Taxpayers are Funding Coronavirus Vaccines, but Big Pharma will Profit

"As it stands now the questions of who will receive the drug and at what cost are in the hands of the drug companies that market them. Companies hope that their research will lead to a patented drug, which would give them exclusive rights to produce and market the drug. I choose the verb market advisedly because the work of discovery has been paid for largely by the government. Nonetheless the successful corporations can choose whatever the market will bear, a classic monopoly situation fostering massive misuse of society’s resources. Dean Baker and Gerald Scorse maintain: “We now have this bizarre mindset that we have to give drug companies patent monopolies to get them to develop drugs or vaccines, even when the government is paying for the bulk of the research. The pandemic is showing the absurdity of this practice.”

Even when government funds research and discovery costs, big pharma maintains that it still needs monopoly profits to fund ongoing research costs. Yet a substantial portion of these profits go to mass media advertising and political lobbying. A destructive self-sustaining cycle is set in motion. "
read article by John Buell​

Taxpayers are Funding Coronavirus Vaccines, but Big Pharma will Profit