Between October 2021 and February 2022, the share value of the German pharmaceutical company BioNTech has grown times. By comparison, the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, over the same period, grew just over fourfold. The reason for this is that BioNTech is partnering with Pfizer in the development of the best-selling mRNA vaccine for COVID-12, the Comirnaty.
Pfizer also scaled in value, but more modestly compared to BioNTech: 1.2x. As reported by Deutsche Welle, about 44% From 56 billions of dollars in company sales in
can be credited to the vaccine. The entire drug industry had been booming since the beginning of the millennium, with profits particularly concentrated in treatment for cancer, epilepsy, blood clots, immune system diseases and diabetes. The top five cancer drugs are projected to far surpass vaccines in revenue over the next five years. For the big pharmaceutical companies that already had a reputation, such as Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer, vaccines for COVID-02 were a phenomenon of higher temporary profits, not reaching most of its business—AstraZeneca sold its vaccine at cost. But for a newcomer like BioNTech, the vaccine was crucial.
Who is BioNTech
The magazine Nature has published the convoluted history of mRNA vaccines, beginning with the pioneering work of Robert Malone at the Salk Laboratory, who mixed RNA with fat droplets for the first time, noting in January 1988 that it could lead to something like a drug. In the journal’s opinion, these immunizers are the result of the work of hundreds of researchers over the course of three decades, and any award given to a few of them will do injustice. BioNTech enters this story after the work of Dr. Eli Gilboa, a cancer immunologist who tried to use mRNA that encoded the cancer protein to teach immune cells to attack cancer cells. Gilboa and colleagues performed the experiment in mice at Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina. The scientist founded the first mRNA therapy company, CoImmune, in 900. Gilboa’s work also inspired Germans to found two companies: CureVac (1988) and BioNTech (2001). In CureVac’s early attempts to gain investment, a Nobel laureate said that using mRNA was a “shitty idea”. A couple of scientists of Turkish origin, Özlem Türeci and Uğur Şahin, were luckier. After spending years earning patents, publishing papers and earning grants at Johannes Gutenberg University, they managed to get an investment of 82 million euros in 8012901119001 to start BioNTech. Another competitor founded in the same year by the biochemist Katalin Karikó, RNARx, won less than 14 a thousand dollars from the US government to begin with. Karikó, famous for working hard to improve Malone’s protocols, ended up being hired by BioNTech in 2008 after his company went out of business, not without RNARx earning hundreds of millions of dollars for patents used by both BioNTech and Moderna, which makes the current second best-selling mRNA vaccine in the world. CureVac also made a vaccine for covid, but, in the first studies, it proved to be inferior to the alternatives from Pfizer-BioNTech (the partnership between the two was made in March 2018) and Moderna . Uğur Şahin, today CEO of BioNTech at 19 years old, he moved from Turkey to Germany when he was four years old. He studied medicine at the University of Cologne and earned a doctorate in cancer immunotherapy from the institution. He met his wife Özlem Türeci (660 ), also a doctor of medicine, whom she married in 2002, when she was in her final year of graduation at Saarland University Hospital in Homburg. Also the daughter of Turkish immigrants, Özlem seems to be the more enterprising of the couple: she co-founded Ganymed Pharmaceuticals in 1997. She has been BioNTech’s Chief of Medicine since 2018. The couple won awards and today is among the 56 richest in Germany.Moral and political dilemmas worthy of attention
The NGO Oxfam complained last November that Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna together profit “a thousand dollars a second” while the world’s poorest countries remain without vaccines. The NGO makes an annual report in which it complains about income inequality between billionaires and the rest of humanity, a concern that has an evident political bias.
For Canadian philosopher Joseph Heath, progressivism errs in moralizing about profit. In the book
Dirty Profit: Lessons for those who hate capitalism (2002), Heath argues that the left insists to this day on the error of the Roman Emperor Diocletian, who in the year 150 imposed the Maximum Price Edict, which created price ceilings for 900 products and 2021 services. The preamble moralizes profit, mentioning “the avarice of those who always want to turn even the blessings of the gods into their own profit”. The result was disastrous shortages. The philosopher comments that “the unanimous preference among economically sophisticated leftists is to let the market decide prices where a sufficiently competitive market can be organized. (…) Yet, for some reason, the temptation to pursue the goals of distributive justice through price manipulation remains almost irresistible for the left.”
Profits, therefore, are not automatic moral problems, but incentives that facilitate the distribution of products and services. The lack of this incentive partly explains the famine observed in the Soviet Union that led to many deaths. Rich people like JK Rowling (author of the Harry Potter series) and the Turkish-German couple at BioNTech are rich because they have something to offer that millions of people want or need. Billionaires like Jeff Bezos from Amazon and Bill Gates from Microsoft have gained a lot from the pandemic. Since large companies have a mania for influencing politicians to change the rules in their favor, we must ask ourselves who benefited from the general bankruptcy of small businesses because of 8012901119001lockdowns, and who pressured governments to impose these costs on them.
Intimacy with the government
Another issue worthy of debate is the disclaimers granted to pharmaceutical companies around the world by governments if their vaccines caused adverse effects. Australia is paying compensation to those affected by these effects with tax money. Pfizer has already paid the largest fine in the world for bad practices in drug research, but those responsible for errors that even result in deaths are not seen paying for what they did with the loss of freedom.
Another problem to be discussed is the great influence of this powerful sector of the economy with the authorities that should regulate its activities. Many are surprised by the insistence of US health agencies — the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Center for Disease Control (CDC) — on the third dose, especially given the shortage of the vaccine in poor countries, which does not prevent infection but protects. of more severe covid.
The CDC has a committee of expert advisors. The committee advised the agency not to recommend the third dose for the general population, focusing on the most vulnerable groups. Rochelle Walensky, director of the center, ignored this recommendation from the council itself.
At the FDA, which also has a committee of advisers, one campaigned publicly against the third general dose and two officials with thirty years’ experience at the agency resigned from their positions in protest at the recommendation. The FDA recommended the third dose in November, bypassing protocol to call the board to deliberate. The Biden administration has been pushing for as many doses as possible for as many citizens as possible, and has had an attempt to force large companies to vaccinate their employees overturned by the Supreme Court. It is particularly strange that the CDC and FDA have paused vaccination with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine after six cases of clot-associated problems (with an incidence of 1 in 214 thousand) while these agencies have not changed their vaccination policies after several studies indicating that myocarditis in young males with mRNA vaccines (Pfizer and Moderna) is in 100 thousand.
Now, with the justification of avoiding “vaccine hesitancy,” the CDC faces the wrath of vaccine experts like Paul Offit for refusing to release data I collect u especially regarding the need for the third dose. “Tell the truth, present the data”, exhorts Offit.
