How The Covid-19 Vaccine Injected Billions Into Big PharmaâAnd Made Its Executives Very Rich
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An exclusive excerpt from
by Nina Burleigh
Before the Covid-19 pandemic, Big Pharma had been easing out of the vaccine business for decades. By 2019, the major vaccine makers supplying America had dwindled to a handful of large companiesâMerck, Sanofi, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson. Because vaccines are only used once or twiceâas opposed to medicines that people take dailyâthey are not profitable. The scale of vaccination programs also invites class action litigation if something goes awry.
The White House needed a whopping amount of money to coax companies to research and test and then produce hundreds of millions of doses. They initially asked for and Congress rapidly appropriated $10 billion. Ultimately, Operation Warp Speed (OWS)âthe U.S. governmentâs Covid-19 relief programâwould dole out $22 billion to Big Pharma.