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Operation Warp Speed “took nearly all the risk away from private pharmaceutical companies,” remarked Scott Atlas, who for a time was a Trump Covid-19 adviser. Conceived by Dr. Peter Marks, the Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine regulator, OWS would be a collaboration between the US military, which would look after logistics, and the Department of Health and Human Services, which would handle planning. OWS planning was headed by pharmaceutical industry executives, whose first important role was to select the companies that would be invited to suckle at Lady Liberty’s teat. Despite the obvious conflict of interest, the executives were granted special exemptions to keep their financial stakes in the companies they were making decisions about.
The OWS supremo, Moncef Slaoui, was a Big Pharma executive who had spent 30 years at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), where he had eventually headed its R&D department. Slaoui had $10 million in GSK stock holdings. He also had over $12 million in Moderna shares and had been on the company’s board since 2017. Slaoui resigned from the company’s board when he joined OWS, but kept over $10 million in stock options.
Slaoui reported to Alex M. Azar II, the health and human services secretary, who had spent three years as president of Eli Lilly’s US subsidiary. Pfizer executives William Erhardt and Rachel Harrigan were brought on board as advisers. Both were allowed to retain their financial stakes in Pfizer.
OWS chose six companies from 50 vaccine candidates. In order to maximize the chance that at least one of them would succeed, Slaoui and his team decided to pick two companies from each of three different vaccine platforms. These would be mRNA (Moderna the Billionaire and Pfizer-BioNTech); viral vector (AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson); and protein-based (Novavax and Sanofi/GSK).
After Slaoui’s team chose Moderna, the company’s share price soared. Two weeks later, Slaoui received options to buy a further 18,270 shares. Erhardt’s and Harrigan’s employer, Pfizer, was granted a guaranteed purchase order of $1.95 billion.
Taxpayer money would flow “to a small group of capitalists with almost no strings attached and little transparency,”35 Nina Burleigh observed. OWS ensured the US government would cover the cost of development, guide the clinical trials, and deliver supplies to factories. It would also guarantee payment for doses, even if development efforts failed to pan out.
The US government financed Moderna’s clinical trials at a cost of $900 million. It also gifted the company with $3.2 billion in advanced purchase orders, topped up with $2.5 billion to buy raw materials, expand its factory, and hire more employees. AstraZeneca received $1.2 billion from Washington and $79 million from London for vaccines, and a further $486 million from the United States to produce a monoclonal antibody drug. Johnson & Johnson received $500,000 in US funding. Novavax got $1.6 billion, while Pfizer-BioNTech got 400 million euros from Germany, $120 million from the European Investment Bank, and $1.95 billion in an advance purchase contract from Washington. Pfizer called on Washington multiple times to get access to manufacturing supplies. Merck received $105 million in US government funding to make vaccines for Johnson & Johnson, along with $29 million and $1.2 billion in advance purchase orders to develop an antiviral pill, while Washington gave Regeneron $450 million for therapeutics. Meanwhile, Sanofi/GSK netted a cool $2.1 billion from Uncle Sam.
Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna turned out to be the big winners. Their mRNA vaccines grew to be widely regarded as the nec plus ultra of Covid-19 inoculations. Significantly, although not surprisingly, an anonymous US government scientist was largely responsible for the success of the companies’ vaccines. Barney Graham “specialized in the kind of long, expensive research that only governments bankroll,”36 The Wall Street Journal explained. In 2016, while working on a vaccine against MERS, Graham developed a method to bioengineer a viral protein that could be used to develop vaccines. BioNTech, Pfizer’s partner, licensed the technique. Graham started working with Moderna in 2017 to dvelop a way to rapidly manufacture vaccines, based on his method. When the genetic code of the novel coronavirus was published in January 2020, Graham immediately applied his invention to SARS-Cov-2, and sent instructions to Moderna on how to manufacture a vaccine to target the virus’s spike protein. Fauci approved a partnership between Moderna and government scientists, telling them, “Go for it. Whatever it costs, don’t worry about it.”
Graham’s work developed out of a long line of earlier work carried out in publicly funded labs. The idea of encasing drugs or vaccines in a lipid nanoparticle shell originated in the 1960s in the MIT lab of Robert Langer. Two researchers, Drew Weissman and Katalin Kariko, at the University of Pennsylvania, took the idea further. Both BioNTech and Moderna licensed the duo’s invention. The two scientists’ work also paved the way for Graham. The culmination of the social process of publicly-funded scientists building on the work of other publicly-funded scientists was the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines. The National Institutes of Health, much to Moderna’s chagrin, labelled Moderna’s vaccine, the NIH-Moderna vaccine, to reflect the significant US government contribution. Fauci averred that the “vaccine was actually developed in my institute’s vaccine research center by a team of scientists led by Dr. Barney Graham and his close colleague, Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett.”38 Moderna, seeking to claim an exclusive patent, contested Fauci’s claim, insisting its own scientists had independently developed the inoculation. But it was clear that without the intervention of the capitalist state, the vaccine Moderna mendaciously claimed as its own, would never have been developed. Biden officials were “privately adamant,” reported The Washington Post, that Moderna owed “its success to the US government.” It was only one of a multitude of companies about which the same could be said.
-Stephen Gowans "The Killer's Henchman: Capitalism and the Covid-19 Disaster"