‘Big pharma’ is the real hero in global fight against Covid
IF YOU want a quiet life, I suggest you avoid a job in the PR department of a large pharmaceutical company. “Big pharma”, as the industry tends to be known, is one of the favourite bogeymen of the age, forever under attack from global justice warriors. Sometimes it is damned for selling us drugs we don’t need, and at other times it is accused of pricing the developing world out of vital medicines, letting the poor die rather than sacrifice its own fat profits.
But it is becoming somewhat difficult to square this picture of villainy with the reality of what Big Pharma has achieved and how it has behaved during the Covid-19 pandemic. One company in particular deserves praise: AstraZeneca. Not, of course, that you would guess that from the attacks on the company which have been launched by the EU this week.
The company has been charged with failing to deliver supplies of its Covid-19 vaccine on time, and of favouring the NHS over EU healthcare systems in what the EU calls “vaccine nationalism”.
OnWednesday, the EU threatened legal action unless the company diverted 75 million doses of the vaccine from the UK to the EU, and on Thursday it raided the company’s factory in Belgium. It is an outrageous and unfair attack. It isn’t EU commissioners – still less social justice warriors – who are going to get us out of this crisis, which has left two million dead and a shattered the global economy.
THE real heroes of the hour are the scientists and technicians who have been beavering away in the laboratories of Big Pharma over the past 12 months. Their efforts – aided by those university-based scientists – have produced effective vaccines in a fraction of the time it has taken to develop such drugs in the past. Moreover, AstraZeneca has promised to make the vaccine available to the whole world at cost price – in perpetuity in the case of low and middle income countries.
The company has granted a licence to an Indian company to produce the vaccine for developing countries, taking advantage of much lower production costs there. It means that the vaccine can be distributed around the world at a cost of just £2.50 a shot.
Compare the altruism of AstraZeneca with the greed of other businesses which have made a killing out of the crisis: companies selling PPE at vastly inflated prices and consultants charging up to £7,000 a day for working on the poorly-performing Test and Trace system.
It hasn’t all been plain sailing for AstraZeneca. Producing a vaccine is a difficult process which can easily go wrong. Scaling-up production to the levels required for mass vaccination programmes has led to delays – first in AstraZeneca’s UK factories and subsequently in its plants in the EU.
Regrettably, that has meant that the company has had to put back the date at which it hopes to deliver the EU’s full complement of vaccines – just as the NHS, too, had to wait. But to claim that AstraZeneca is favouring Britain isn’t true. As the company’s chief executive Pascal Soriot explained, the EU put in its order for the vaccine three months later than the UK – but now it expects the goods delivered at the same time.
By the way, Soriot would make a rather odd English nationalist, given that he is French. Like so many successful UK companies, AstraZeneca has attracted talent from around the world. Moreover, the company is partly Swedishowned. The idea that it is acting in the UK’s national interest is absurd. If the EU is struggling
with its vaccination programme it is its own fault.
It set up a pan-European vaccine programme, forbidding member states from placing their own orders.Then it ordered too few vaccines, didn’t order them soon enough and failed to adjust those orders when some vaccines completed successful trials much earlier than others.
SO the EU is relying on vaccines which won’t be approved for months. The European Medicines Agency has been late in approving vaccines for emergency use compared with Britain’s regulator, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA). It took four weeks longer to approve the Pfizer vaccine. As for the AstraZeneca vaccine it is only expected to be approved today, a month after the MHRA gave it the go-ahead.
No one should take any pleasure from the EU’s difficulties. It is in all our interests that as many people globally are vaccinated as soon as possible. But we must celebrate the success of Big Pharma. They have done the world a huge service by rising to the challenge of delivering the vaccines – and that needs to be recognised.
‘EU ordered too few vaccines and didn’t order them soon enough’