Tribune. Cooperation in the field of medical research and in the pharmaceutical sector seems to be much more effective than competition. It made it possible to quickly find vaccines against Covid-19, in particular those with messenger RNA.
But this economic collaboration did not go to the end of its purpose. It has failed to transform this vaccine discovery into a global public good, despite the globalization of the health crisis and despite the demand for the lifting of patents on these vaccines by certain countries, particularly the United States and France.
However, this lifting would have allowed poor countries to access vaccines. It would also have enabled States to be much less dependent on multinational pharmaceutical firms.
The pharmaceutical sector today is both an economic system subsidized by the public authorities and a private economic system governed by the laws of the market. The agreements between states and multinational pharmaceutical companies for Covid vaccines are an illustration of this.
Paradoxical economic logic
For messenger RNA vaccines, there have been three decades of public funding. In addition to this public subsidization, there is the guarantee of production and of sales, provided by pre-orders and the issuance of state patents.
Without this funding and without these guarantees, the Pfizer group and other competing pharmaceutical industries would never have been able to finish developing their vaccine and bring them to market so quickly to fight the epidemic. This cooperation is thus confronted with two paradoxical economic logics.
On the one hand, to satisfy the general interest through public health, and on the other, to satisfy the private interest through the granting of monopolies thanks to patents. However, the second tends to prevail over the first by adapting to market rules governing access to health.
These rules rarely respect the conditions of competition guaranteeing the efficient functioning of the market. Indeed, only a few multinational pharmaceutical firms currently dominate the market. Being the first to be able to manufacture and market their vaccines, they have acquired a dominant position.
This situation was reinforced with the exclusive contracts signed with various States, with the European Union and the four pharmaceutical groups concerned. These commitments imposed by these companies dissuade most States from financing the development of other so-called “inactive” conventional vaccines manufactured by SMEs in the sector. They thus delay the entry of these new vaccines on the market and, in fact, slow down the exit from the health crisis.
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