‘Evil’ Big Pharma is, in fact, saving us from COVID-19

WASHINGTON » The end of the pandemic is finally in sight. The Food and Drug Administration has approved a third coronavirus vaccine from Johnson & Johnson, which has partnered with its bitter rival Merck to produce 94 million doses in the next eight weeks. Together with the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, the J&J vaccine is expected to provide enough doses to inoculate every American adult by the end of May — two months ahead of schedule.

Not since World War II has an industry mobilized to rescue humanity in this way. So as our long national nightmare approaches its end, it’s worth reflecting on a couple of salient truths: It was the pharmaceutical industry Democrats demonized during the last election that saved us, while the government health experts they lionized failed us.

In 2019, before the pandemic hit, the pharmaceutical industry was painted as public enemy No. 1 in the Democratic primaries. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., declared that “the pharmaceutical industry is the biggest bunch of crooks in this country,” accused them of “literally killing Americans” and promised to “get rid of the profiteering of the drug companies.” Then-Sen. Kamala D. Harris said pharmaceutical executives “are nothing more than some high-level dope dealers” who care “about profit and not about public health.” Even then-candidate Joe Biden criticized the “greed of drug companies.”

Well, now those greedy drug companies have rescued mankind. Before covid, the record for the fastest vaccine development was about four years. The drug companies did it in a matter of months, because they invested billions of dollars of those profits in developing advanced vaccine technologies that were ready just when humanity needed them. The mRNA technology behind the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines had been developed a decade earlier to treat cancer and other illnesses. It took Moderna scientists just two days to create the mRNA sequences to fight covid, and just over a month more to begin the first trials. The technology is so easily reprogrammable that Moderna has already created a possible booster against the variant first identified in South Africa. As the virus mutates, pharmaceutical companies will likely be able to adapt to new variants and create new boosters in months.

This is nothing short of a medical miracle, and every American should be grateful for the innovative free enterprise system that produced it. Government helped, to be sure, thanks to Operation Warp Speed. But it did so by enabling the private sector — assuming the risk of vaccine development by promising to buy hundreds of millions of doses before the vaccines were proven. But that public health achievement was made necessary by three catastrophic mistakes public health officials made in the early days of the pandemic that enabled the spread of covid across the United States.

First, government scientists relied on a flu surveillance system that failed to detect the spread of covid-19. They were looking for a spike in patients presenting with flu-like symptoms at hospitals, but because many of those infected with covid were asymptomatic, they were not picked up by this monitoring.

Second, they bungled the development of a diagnostic test for covid-19. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention refused to allow commercial and academic labs to develop tests, and limited tests to people who had traveled to foreign hot spots or reported contact with someone with a confirmed case. And then scientists at the CDC contaminated the only approved test kits with sloppy lab practices, rendering them ineffective.

As a result, they thought the virus was not spreading when, in fact, it was spreading like wildfire. This is why Anthony Fauci kept telling us there was nothing to worry about. On Feb. 17, 2020, he told USA Today that people should be more worried about the “real and present danger” of seasonal flu. On Feb.

29, he said, “there is no need to change anything that you’re doing.” On March 9, he advised that “If you are a healthy young person, there is no reason if you want to go on a cruise ship, go on a cruise ship.” On March 10, Fauci was adamant that “as a nation, the risk is relatively low.” That was disastrously wrong.

Then there was the third calamitous mistake: They told us not to wear masks. In a March 8 “60 Minutes” interview, Fauci said “there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask” because while masks “might make people feel better,” they could actually make you sick because “people keep fiddling with the mask and touching their face.” It was not until April 3 that the CDC recommended masks.

If the government had not made these failures of detection, testing and masking, many thousands of lives, and millions of jobs, might have been spared. So, government made the pandemic worse, while the private sector saved us from it. Something to think about when you get your inoculation.