Big Pharma is not a charity

The struggle to find a workable vaccine for COVID-19 is usually presented in black-and-white terms.

On the one hand is the coronavirus itself in all of its malign potency.

Arrayed against it are the forces of good — the scientists who develop the vaccines, the companies that manufacture them and the governments that pay for it all.

There is some truth to this simple binary distinction. But as the events of recent days have reminded us, the battle against the pandemic is full of complications.

The drug giants that are working with the federal government to fight the virus are also battling that same government’s efforts to have its Patented Medicine Prices Review Board reduce pharmaceutical costs.

Set up in 1987, the board’s job is to prevent pharmaceutical companies from charging exorbitant prices for new drugs.

It does so by comparing prices charged in Canada with those in other countries.

Up to now, the board has compared Canada to high-cost countries like the U.S. and Switzerland. Justin Trudeau’s Liberals have promised to use lowercost countries, like Australia and Norway, as comparators instead.

The Liberals argue that drug costs must be reduced somehow if Canada is to create a national, universal pharmacare system.

Until last year, Big Pharma seemed an easy target.

But then the pandemic came along. The search for vaccines took priority. The government began to refer to Big Pharma as its “vaccine partners.” And the proposed regulatory reforms to the prices review board were delayed for a year — until July 2021.

The government insists that this delay has nothing to do with its vaccine efforts. Perhaps that is true.

But Ottawa’s vaccine strategy, which is premised on co-operation with Big Pharma, certainly weakened the government’s hand in the standoff over prices.

The co-operation strategy did lead to deals that promised access to European-made vaccines developed by Pfizer and Moderna.

But when Pfizer unilaterally changed the timing of its vaccine rollout to Canada, Ottawa was left flat-footed. It was unable to prevent the company from interrupting its vaccine shipments to Canada in order to favour its European customers.

Nor, it seems, does Ottawa have the power to prevent the European Union from unilaterally interfering with the export of European-made vaccines to Canada.

Some in the EU are calling for such export controls. They argue that since companies like Pfizer and the British firm AstraZeneca profited from EU support, Europeans should be first in line when their vaccines become available — regardless of any commercial deals signed with outsider nations like Canada.

Ottawa does not accept this argument and says the federal government has been reassured that any such controls won’t affect Canada.

Let’s hope Ottawa is right. Because if the EU orders companies to suspend vaccine exports to Canada, the drug firms will almost certainly comply.

Big Pharma is in this for the long haul. The pandemic has created an unprecedented opportunity for the brandname drug firms.

They have been presented with a global crisis that is in their power to alleviate.

If they make vaccines, they are sure to profit. If it turns out that the virus routinely mutates, they will profit even more.

That’s because a mutating virus demands constant attention. Unlike, say, polio, it is not defeated by one or two shots over a person’s lifetime.

If Big Pharma is lucky, the coronavirus vaccination will become an annual event — like the flu shot — that addresses the problem but never fully solves it.

I say this not because Big Pharma is uniquely evil. It is merely a profitmaking industry operating in a situation of life or death.

But it is not a charity. If we want to understand the problems behind the vaccine rollout, we should keep that in mind.