pharma

An international, multi-billion-dollar race is underway to develop a COVID-19 vaccine, and progress is moving at record speed, but with nationalistic, competitive undertones. If and when an effective vaccine is invented, its production will require an unprecedented effort to vaccinate people across the globe. However, for the country that invents a safe and effective vaccine, at least in the urgent short term, it will be politically difficult to export vaccines before their own population is immunized. “The only solution,” vaccine development scientist Sandy Douglas told The New York Times, “is to make a hell of a lot of vaccine in a lot of different places.” But how? Having the public sector fund contracts with vaccine makers is a key component to meeting this future, unprecedented, dis...

Americans are increasingly concerned that regulators and manufacturers will rush a vaccine to market without an adequate review. That prompted nine vaccine front-runners, including Pfizer and Merck, to promise to abide by clinical and ethical standards in an effort to increase the public’s confidence in any vaccine that ultimately comes to market. As a scholar of law, public health and bioethics, I have extensively studied vaccine policy, as well as the laws and regulations governing human subject research and FDA-regulated medical products. In my view, the pledge is little more than a public relations strategy, with companies simply reaffirming that they’ll follow FDA guidelines and standard scientific practices. While I doubt the biotech pledge will do much to increase public confiden...