Vaccine Rivalry

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres recently declared a future COVID-19 treatment to be "a public good" that must be made available to everyone. 

Whoever wins the race to come up with a successful coronavirus vaccine will also win massive profits. But while the industry vows to make a vaccine globally accessible, not all are on board with that idea. What began with national export bans for face masks and ventilators could now evolve into a type of "medical nationalism" affecting future vaccination campaigns worldwide.

A dilemma for both the pharmaceutical industry and politicians around the globe is already emerging: which countries will be served first with a vaccine?

German health expert Ilona Kickbusch told DW:  "For the time being, there are no international rules for sharing any possible vaccine in an equitable way."

Jürgen Wasem, a professor for healthcare management at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany, notes that drugs research and development is usually driven by market forces.

"This poses the risk that markets in western Europe, Japan and the United States will be supplied first because patients there are able to pay the highest prices," he told DW. "This problem prevails in all pharmaceuticals markets around the world." 

Supply bottlenecks for some specific drugs are often the result of the pricing policies pursued by major drugmakers, says Wasem — a claim, which is nonetheless "difficult to prove in most cases," he says. Sometimes, companies strive to keep supply artificially low, he says, to achieve higher market prices. Moreover, certain treatments are often never developed because there isn't a "commercial incentive" to undertake the effort, he adds. 

Specific details about what commercial agreements between the industry and governments could look like are still being kept under wraps. David Loew, executive vice president of Swiss drugmaker Sanofi Pasteur, already demanded a "risk pact" between business and politics to share the financial burden.

"What we need are assurances from politics that a certain volume [of the coronavirus vaccine] will be bought for a specific price," he told German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung recently. "Our shareholders could argue: 'Why don't you focus on something more secure instead'," Loew added. Risk-sharing agreements between governments and pharmaceutical firms are nothing unusual, says Kickbusch, and are even favored by an industry hugely dependent on public money to offer certain volumes and country-specific pricing models for some of their medicines.