BIG PHARMA MIGHT SAVE THE WORLD.

For several years now governments in Canada have been waging war on the global pharmaceutical industry, part of a pattern of state intervention based on the premise that the world’s drugmakers, members of Big Pharma, are price-gouging manipulators that need to be controlled.

In Ottawa, the Trudeau Liberals have promised to introduce pharmacare, a national regulatory plan to fix prices low and control the supply of drugs. Canada’s current Patented Medicine Prices Review Board (PMPRB) has been active for many years in the business of controlling prescription prices — an operation that is widely said to be one of many government- generated causes of Canada’s declining pharmaceutical manufacturing capacity and ongoing drug shortages.

Over the years, Canadians have been taught to be suspicious of Big Pharma, described helpfully by Wikipedia as a “conspiracy theory” to the effect that large pharmaceutical companies “operate for sinister purposes and against the public good, and that they allegedly conceal effective treatments, or even cause and worsen a wide range of diseases.”

But then along came COVID-19, a viral pandemic the world’s governments have spent tens of trillions of dollars trying to control, with limited success. The ultimate triumph over the virus, it turns out, may well come from the industry politicians and activists love to hate. Big Pharma is riding to the rescue of the governments that have tried to bring it down.

But having done so much to undermine the drug industry via controls, squeezing prices and meddling in the market over the years, Canada has been setting itself up as a non-player in the world drug industry. And as a non-player, it looks like Canada will be standing in line waiting for vaccines while countries with manufacturing capacity — the United States, Germany, England — will receive vaccines sooner.

Warnings that Canada’s pricing and regulatory regimes will undermine the country’s pharmaceutical capacity have been sounding for years. Just last month the industry

COVID vaccines are coming from the same Big Pharma Ott awa has tried to squeeze out.

warned that “innovative new medicines” will not launch in Canada if the government proceeds with the latest PMPRB price regimes. Brett Skinner, CEO of the Canadian Health Policy Institute, wrote last February that “Extreme regulations to lower drug prices mean Canada will get fewer new drugs.”

Last May, industry consultants said Canada should not let price controls delay access to the emerging COVID-19 vaccines. Since then, the government has said it will not attempt to regulate the price of vaccines as they enter the market.

Promising not to try to lower the cost of the vaccines is at least the beginning of good policy, but Canadians still deserve to understand why a first- rank global nation such as Canada does not have a strong and competitive pharmaceutical industry complementary to the world- dominant operations in the United States.

Maybe there’s something to be learned from the U.S. model, which has been to allow the market to set drug prices. Could it be that prices and profits drive the innovation needed to advance the production and distribution of new drugs? Toronto law professor Richard Owens, writing on this page in June, agreed with President Donald Trump when he said that Canada and other countries are effectively being subsidized by U.S. consumers.

The success of the Big Pharma vaccine efforts should help dissuade the public from the idea that the industry is a malevolent industrial complex — although the actual arrival of viable COVID-19 vaccines is unlikely to sway the corporate critics and activists.

Just as the pandemic was spreading, critics were set to denounce the industry: “Big Pharma prepares to profit from the coronavirus,” said one report, implying that there was some immoral activity taking place. How dare they! But profit is exactly the point. The push for profits is what is driving Pfizer, Astrazeneca, Moderna and other companies to develop a product that will save lives.

This idea does not sit well with the likes of Gerald Posner, an investigative journalist and corporate conspiratorialist whose books include Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America. Posner sees the companies as mainly out to repair their reputations. COVID-19 “will potentially be a blockbuster for the industry in terms of sales and profits,” said Posner, who seems to see that as a moral problem.

Enhanced Big Pharma reputations may well be the result. In its search for COVID profits, Pfizer last March issued US$ 1.25 billion in “sustainability bonds” under the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGS). The money raised, said Pfizer, will be used to fund capital investments in the manufacturing and development of medicines and vaccines, including the COVID vaccines.

By issuing the bonds and taking a lead role on the vaccine search, Pfizer may in fact be seizing an opportunity to improve its image. Sustainalytics, which ranks corporations according to their perceived ability to live up to dubious environmental, social and governance objectives, currently ranks Pfizer as a “high-risk” operation.

At the end of the day, however, the arrival of effective vaccines will in fact mark another triumph in the role of profit-maximizing corporations in bringing good to society. The story will be how Big Pharma rescued global governments from the COVID-19 pandemic — and at a fraction of the cost of what governments have expended on the project.