Inoculating the Coronavirus Vaccine Against the Profit Pandemic – The New Republic

This week, scientists at the Kaiser Permanente Research Institute in Seattle, Washington, administered the first injection of a trial vaccine for the coronavirus. As The Associated Press reported it, the mood was optimistic. Were on team coronavirus now, said Kaisers Dr. Lisa Jackson. The recipient of this first dose, 43-year-old Jennifer Haller, offered tones of civic pride: This is an amazing opportunity for me to do something. These are just the first steps in what would be, in the best-case scenario, a 12- to 18-month wait for a medical breakthrough. All over the world, similar efforts are ongoing, the hope being that this vital work can be carried out without interruption or interference.

Naturally, we have also recently received a reminder of the extent to which our dreadful politics might provide the impediments necessary to blunt the efforts of vaccine researchers. Word leaked out this week that Donald Trump had apparently tried to lure a team of German researchers to the United States so that they could carry through cutting-edge research on developing a coronavirus vaccine here. (The European Union is now responding to try to keep its researchers there.)

Its not clear exactly what Trump hoped to gain if his efforts succeeded. There was speculation that he had planned to make the vaccine available exclusively for people in the U.S., although as a practical matter, it is difficult to envision how this could have been accomplished. Perhaps Trump was just hoping for bragging rights, that the U.S. had developed the first effective coronavirus vaccine. (In a best-case scenario, it will be at least a year until one is widely available, an inconvenient truth for those who are currently endeavoring to engineer the presidents reelection.)

While it is not worth a lot of effort unraveling Trumps thinking, we should be doing some serious thinking ourselves about the development of a coronavirus vaccine and biomedical research more generally. The situation we see today is that many top-notch researchers, in Germany, China, the U.S., and elsewhere, are racing to develop a vaccine that can enter the testing process. The problem with this picture is that they are working in competition, not collaboration. This means that they are not widely sharing information with each other, since they dont want to give their competitors an edge.

Continue reading here:

Inoculating the Coronavirus Vaccine Against the Profit Pandemic - The New Republic