Why is the US Government giving exclusive rights to a Zika Vaccine to a Pharma giant

t’s a familiar, if tragic, pattern: A medical breakthrough is discovered at public expense, only to be licensed to a private corporation that earns billions of dollars by making it unaffordable for ordinary people.

The latest such giveaway involves a vaccine for the Zika virus, which can cause microcephaly, blindness, deafness, and calcification of the brain in children whose mothers were infected during pregnancy. Though the new vaccine is still being tested, it shows great promise. It was developed at the Walter Reed Army Institute for Research, and the Department of the Army funded its development.

Now the Army is planning to grant exclusive rights to this potentially groundbreaking medicine–along with as much as $173 million in funding from the Department of Health and Human Services—to the French pharmaceutical corporation Sanofi Pasteur. Sanofi manufactures a number of vaccines, but it’s also faced repeated allegations of overcharges and fraud. Should the vaccine prove effective, Sanofi would be free to charge whatever it wants for it in the United States. Ultimately, the vaccine could end up being unaffordable for those most vulnerable to Zika, and for cash-strapped states.

Activists and lawmakers have been resisting the giveaway since a nongovernmental organization called Knowledge Ecology International (KEI) first raised the alarm late last year. Its campaign gained new momentum last week when elected officials from Florida, including Senator Bill Nelson and nine members of the House of Representatives, wrote letters of objection to acting Army Secretary Robert Speer. The legislators called for public hearings before any licensing agreement is finalized. “Providing a single drugmaker exclusive control over a desperately needed vaccine could create an environment in which the vaccine is unaffordable to those who need it most,” Nelson wrote. “Given the considerable federal investment and the need for the vaccine, I believe it’s critical that the vaccine be available and accessible to the taxpayers who already invested in the research and development of the vaccine.”

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Intl.Aperture said:

Right. And to be clear, I'm not saying people shouldn't be aware of mosquito borne illnesses here in the U.S. and we DO have a population of poor who WILL be affected by this illness, but it will not be large or widespread.

In men the Zika virus is mild, out of work for maybe a day - most of our staff in these countries have had it and never said a word. But this is a disease whose greatest impact is on pregnant women and VERY young children - and even then symptoms only present in about 10% of cases. It's the propaganda of seeing those children with misshapen heads that galvanizes people into action. Of course it's horrible and we should work to stop it but there will never be a mass outbreak of deadly Zika in the U.S. - even for the poor. Again, Dengue and Chikungunya are the real killers. I'm sure we will hear lots about Zika again in the future once this vaccine gets released so that everyone can line up and get the shot.

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