How a Big Pharma Company Stalled a Potentially Lifesaving Vaccine in Pursuit of Bigger Profits

A vaccine against tuberculosis, the world’s deadliest infectious disease, has never been closer to reality, with the potential to save millions of lives. But its development slowed after its corporate owner focused on more profitable vaccines.

Ever since he was a medical student, Dr. Neil Martinson has confronted the horrors of tuberculosis, the world’s oldest and deadliest pandemic. For more than 30 years, patients have streamed into the South African clinics where he has worked — migrant workers, malnourished children and pregnant women with HIV — coughing up blood. Some were so emaciated, he could see their ribs. They’d breathed in the contagious bacteria from a cough on a crowded bus or in the homes of loved ones who didn’t know they had TB. Once infected, their best option was to spend months swallowing pills that often carried terrible side effects. Many died.

So, when Martinson joined a call in April 2018, he was anxious for the verdict about a tuberculosis vaccine he’d helped test on hundreds of people.

The results blew him away: The shot prevented over half of those infected from getting sick; it was the biggest TB vaccine breakthrough in a century. He hung up, excited, and waited for the next step, a trial that would determine whether the shot was safe and effective enough to sell.

Weeks passed. Then months.

Fedizen,

this is a textbook example of why unrestrained capitalism doesnt work. You either need to hand everyone money or purposefully manipulate the financial incentives. Otherwise you get the basic “do you rich people want this?” distortion and we’re increasingly seeing how badly this distortion affects supplies of food, housing, etc.

agent_flounder,
@agent_flounder@lemmy.one avatar

Indeed. Unfortunately the tendency is for restrained capitalist systems to inch toward unrestrained oligopoly through greed leading to corruption and regulatory capture, absent eternal, aggressive vigilance.

It isn’t hard to see that the goal of profit maximization is incompatible with the goals for healthcare, food, housing, prison systems. And is also at odds with preserving the environment.

phoenixz,

Every system will slowly creep to corruption and profit for a select few. It’s a constant and never ending battle.

Just because it happens doesn’t mean that we should just jump ship. It means we need to push back harder. In a case like this I’d say a criminal investigation might be warranted. Of your company could save millions but didn’t for profit, then there is a paper trail and you follow that to those that made the decisions. You throw them in jail to make an example.

Then you improve laws to make sure captialism remains curbed and limited.

Aceticon,

Money IS Power, and Power is something modern politics almost never talks about (though if you go look at older ideologies like Marxism, it was all the rage to talk about power).

So yeah, things will happen in certain ways, not just economically but at all levels, because those with lots of money use the power it gives them (which is insanelly more than what most other people have, since the curve of wealth distribution is pretty much an exponential one) to make things happen the way they want.

Once you look back at the whole system with an “old fashioned” prism of “where’s the power and what is being done with it” and with awareness of Money as a giver of Power, a lot of things suddenly look different: for example Neoliberalism, with its desire for a Small State that does not regulate, is trying to weaken the power of the State - which in Democracy is controlled by representatives of voters (ideally, but often not quite) elected in a system were all votes count the same (i.e. all voters have the same amount of Power) - desires the de facto weakenning of the power of the State, hence of the evenly distributed Power of the Vote, which leaves Money (with it’s hugelly uneven distribution) as the sole Power - in other words, Neoliberalism is an ideology to destroy Democracy, replacing with with an Oligarchy.

Mind you, there are lot of other vectors through which the Power Of Money subverts Democracy (such as the buying of politicians and the Press), but the realization that what 4 decades of Neoliberalism have been working towards is to change the system so that votes have little real power - de facto destroying what makes Democracy democratic and leaving voting as nothing more than a meaningless performance - explains A LOT of the problems we see nowadays in democratic nations, because Money has never been this close to be the one and only Power (even in the old days the Power of Money was second to the Power of The Monarch, though in the time of the Robber Barons in the US maybe it was a bit like now)

agent_flounder,
@agent_flounder@lemmy.one avatar

Interesting and very helpful framing. I suppose it’s been at the back of my mind but to call out power explicitly and analyze through that lens does indeed clear up quite a lot.

Aceticon,

I only started thinking about it from this point of view maybe a year ago.

It’s both interesting and scary how almost nobody in modern politics seems to talk about politics as the pursuit of power, as if Democracy has transcended such things and yet governing, in Democracy or not, is nothing more than the exercising of Power.

It’s also an explanation for most people’s pursuit of Money: even the most basic objective of getting enough money to be able to live as you want is about Freedom, or in other words Power over ones’ own destiny.

Food for thought.

_cnt0,
@_cnt0@unilem.org avatar

“Any suggestion that our commitment to continued investment in global health has reduced, is fundamentally untrue,” Dr. Thomas Breuer, the company’s chief global health officer, wrote in a statement.

The company told ProPublica […] that a vaccine for TB is radically different from the company’s other vaccines because it can’t be sold at scale in wealthy countries.

This is the best summary I could come up with. I am not a bot ;-)

wheres_my_pinata,

I find it odd that the author did not really talk about the insurance companies at all. In the US, big pharma tends to make sure the payers (insurance companies) will actually cover a drug before they spend the money to bring it over the finish line. The payers look to maximize their revenue too, which means they are more interested in treatments that will (1) keep subscribers alive and paying into the system for the longest while (2) also reducing bigger more expensive health care costs down the road. Basically means that preventive treatments for younger people with private insurance get the priority. Pharma doesn’t decide their research priorities in a vacuum.

Eccentric,

The point is that a TB vaccine wouldn’t be administered much in the US, but mostly to people in extreme poverty in South Africa and Eastern Europe. The article says that the organizations most likely to buy the vaccine would be local governments and non-profits, which can afford to pay a much lower price than insurance companies in the US. That’s why a TB vaccine is a lower priority than shingles, because the market for a TB vaccine would be people living in extreme poverty in developing countries, while shingles is mostly a concern for affluent people with insurance in the US, even though a TB vaccine would save many more lives.

wheres_my_pinata,

I should have been more clear. I totally get, and agree, with your point. And I realize that my topic was implied in the article because of that point. I was just disappointed the author didn’t explicitly call out the payers too. The whole system is broken, it’s not just the pharma companies. I think it’s important to shine a light on the entire ecosystem if we’re ever going to have a prayer of combatting it.

Eccentric,

Sorry if I came off as patronizing. You’re right, that’s definitely a problem and it’s a shame life saving treatments can’t get made because they’re less profitable than gaming our broken system

Fuckswearwords,
@Fuckswearwords@lemmy.world avatar

Well this is the system we keep voting for … there’s not profit in curing a disease …

AnUnusualRelic,
@AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world avatar

But, we already have a vaccine against tuberculosis (BCG vaccine).

MeowZedong,
@MeowZedong@lemmygrad.ml avatar

BCG isn’t nearly as protective as modern vaccines aim to be. The GSK vaccine in question in the article and similar ones in development in other research groups are aiming to improve protection over BCG.

It’s insane how common latent TB is on a global scale and it’s quite a challenging problem to solve from a technical standpoint.

AnUnusualRelic,
@AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world avatar

OK, thanks for the clarification.

somethingsnappy,

BCG is about 100 years old, and only ever worked at all in sometimes preventing infants/toddlers from getting a systemic TB infection. Source: exclusively worked in TB vaccine research for 14 years, and have had at least one TB vaccine project for the other 8 years of my career.

spacecowboy,

The motherfuckers that do this should be charged with crimes against humanity.

Kage520,

Maybe but there aren’t any laws. Which means we need some good laws to make this not happen. Not sure where to start there, maybe, if your treatment you discover will not be pursued, you must surrender it to the government? And if you hide it instead then crime against humanity?

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