How The Covid-19 Vaccine Injected Billions Into Big Pharma—And Made Its Executives Very Rich
Vitamin D and Its Potential Benefit for the COVID-19 Pandemic
Experimental studies have shown that vitamin D exerts several actions that are thought to be protective against coronavirus disease (COVID-19) infectivity and severity.
Can vitamin D protect against the coronavirus disease 2019 ...
Feb 09, 2021 · One study of 489 people found that those who had a vitamin D deficiency were more likely to test positive for the virus that causes COVID-19 than people who had normal levels of vitamin D. Other research has observed high rates of vitamin D deficiency in people with COVID-19 who experienced acute respiratory failure. These people had a significantly higher risk of dying.
Effects of Vitamin D on COVID-19 Infection and Prognosis ...
Vitamin D has direct antiviral effects primarily against enveloped viruses, and coronavirus is an enveloped virus. The 2019 coronavirus disease had a high mortality rate and impacted the whole population of the planet, with severe acute respiratory syndrome the principal cause of death.
The Impact of Vitamin D Level on COVID-19 Infection ...
5 rows · Mar 05, 2021 · The qualitative synthesis indicated that vitamin D deficient individuals were at higher risk of ...
See all 5 rows on www.ncbi.nlm.nih.govREFERENCES COUNTRY SAMPLE SIZE STUDY DESIGN RESULTS AND CONCLU… 1. Meltzer et al. (… USA 499 Cohort VDD (RR = 1.77) are at hig… 2. Raharusun et … Indonesia 780 Cohort The odds of death were hi…
Vitamin D deficiency and COVID-19: A case-control study at ...
Vitamin D status appears to be strongly associated with COVID-19 clinical severity. After COVID-19 confirmation, Vitamin D level should be measured in all patients and curative plus preventive therapy should be initiated.
Evidence Regarding Vitamin D and Risk of COVID-19 and Its ...
Oct 31, 2020 · Vitamin D is a negative endocrine RAS modulator and inhibits renin expression and generation and it appears likely that vitamin D deficiency amelioration would limit the COVID-19 BK storm. However, further investigation is needed to evaluate the role of vitamin D in this context
Vitamin D and COVID-19: What to Know - WebMD
Vitamin D: The truth about an alleged Covid ‘cover-up ...
Evidence that Vitamin D Supplementation Could Reduce Risk ...
Evidence that Vitamin D Supplementation Could Reduce Risk of Influenza and COVID-19 Infections and Deaths. The world is in the grip of the COVID-19 pandemic. Public health measures that can reduce the risk of infection and death in addition to quarantines are desperately needed.
Do vitamin D, zinc, and other supplements help prevent ...
COVID-19: Poor outcomes in patients with zinc deficiency
COVID-19 patients with zinc deficiency were compared to those with normal zinc levels. Results: COVID-19 patients (n = 47) showed significantly lower zinc levels when compared to healthy controls (n = 45): median 74.5 (interquartile range 53.4-94.6) μg/dl vs 105.8 (interquartile range 95.65-120.90) μg/dl (p < 0.001). Amongst the COVID-19 patients, 27 (57.4%) were found to be zinc deficient.
Conclusions: The study data clearly show that a significant number of COVID-19 patients were zinc deficient. These zinc deficient patients developed more complications, and the deficiency was associated with a prolonged hospital stay and increased mortality.
An exclusive excerpt from Virus: Vaccinations, the CDC, and the Hijacking of America’s Response to the Pandemic by Nina Burleigh
Before the Covid-19 pandemic, Big Pharma had been easing out of the vaccine business for decades. By 2019, the major vaccine makers supplying America had dwindled to a handful of large companies—Merck, Sanofi, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson. Because vaccines are only used once or twice—as opposed to medicines that people take daily—they are not profitable. The scale of vaccination programs also invites class action litigation if something goes awry.
The White House needed a whopping amount of money to coax companies to research and test and then produce hundreds of millions of doses. They initially asked for and Congress rapidly appropriated $10 billion. Ultimately, Operation Warp Speed (OWS)—the U.S. government’s Covid-19 relief program—would dole out $22 billion to Big Pharma.
The amounts of money were the kinds of sums normally seen in the smaller defense budget line items, but were massive for a public health project—$2.5 billion to Moderna, $1.2 billion to AstraZeneca, half a billion dollars to Johnson & Johnson, and $1.6 billion to a small company called Novavax. Only Pfizer opted out of ponying up to the trough at first—it didn’t want to devote resources to coordinating with the US government on its work.
In July, Pfizer signed a $1.95 billion deal to sell one hundred million doses of its two-shot vaccine to the United States, enough for fifty million people. It would be the first to reach American arms. The price per double shot—about forty dollars—is comparable to the price per shot of the flu vaccine. By February, the government had ordered three hundred million doses from Moderna, with its first shipment of one hundred million priced at thirty dollars per double-shot dose—cheaper than Pfizer partly because the United States had forked over nearly a billion dollars to Moderna research. Moderna’s CEO has said the price per dose will be higher for retail once the government contracts phase out.
Because the project worked, it may well elude financial investigation.
OWS was staffed at every level by pharmaceutical industry executives and their revolving door of allies in the government. They could, if they wished, keep their investments thanks to a special exemption. Brought on as “contractors,” they were not subject to federal conflict-of-interest regulations in place for employees. OWS advisers with connections and investments had to agree to assign some of their Covid vaccine earnings to the NIH—but they could wait to do so until after their deaths.
OWS was staffed at every level by pharmaceutical industry executives and their revolving door of allies in the government. They could, if they wished, keep their investments thanks to a special exemption. Brought on as “contractors,” they were not subject to federal conflict-of-interest regulations in place for employees. OWS advisers with connections and investments had to agree to assign some of their Covid vaccine earnings to the NIH—but they could wait to do so until after their deaths.
Former Big Pharma executive Moncef Slaoui sat on the board of Moderna. Thirteen days after the first massive infusion of taxpayer money into its coffers—which triggered a jump in the company’s stock price—Slaoui was awarded options to buy 18,270 shares in the company, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings first reviewed by Kaiser Health News. Those shares were added to 137,168 options he’d accumulated since 2018. He reaped an estimated $8 million when he resigned from the Moderna board.
Among the other known connections between OWS and Big Pharma cash: OWS advisers and Pfizer employees William Erhardt and Rachel Harrigan maintained financial stakes of unknown value in Pfizer, the recipient of a nearly $2 billion HHS contract for one hundred million doses of its vaccine. Richard Whitley, an adviser on the vaccine safety panel, is associated with Gilead, maker of the Covid antiviral agent remdesivir. Adviser Carlo de Notaristefani is connected to Teva, maker of the Trump-approved hydroxychloroquine. Former FDA commissioners Dr. Scott Gottlieb and Dr. Mark McClellan, informally advising the federal response, both have seats on the boards of Covid vaccine developers.
Even more money was raining down on company insiders trading on good-news releases. Executives at Moderna and Pfizer cashed in on the vaccine, selling shares timed precisely to clinical trial press releases.
The Big Shot: Albert Bourla, CEO of Pfizer
JAMEL TOPPIN/THE FORBES COLLECTION
On November 9, the day Pfizer announced its more than 90 percent vaccine efficacy, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla sold more than half of his holdings—62 percent. It was a good day to sell—the positive news jacked stock prices 15 percent. Bourla was among seven Pfizer executives who collectively earned $14 million from stock sales in 2020, according to data provided to the Los Angeles Times by Equilar, an executive compensation and corporate governance data firm.
Not to be outdone, Moderna executives made $287 million from timed stock sales in 2020—and kept going. In just a few days in late January and February 2021, Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel sold millions of dollars’ worth of his stock.
The Trump administration’s best and brightest Covid solution—throw public money at private industry with almost no oversight of the contracting procedure—will stand as one of the most audacious efforts in the administration’s free market ideological playbook. The full roster of this pharmaceutical windfall club will probably never be revealed.
Timing stock sales like that is neither unusual nor illegal. Columbia Law School economist Joshua Mitts has found that execs in many sectors are up to three times more likely to sell o their company stock on days when their companies announce positive news than on days when negative, neutral, or no news is released.
The pandemic crisis offered a challenge that government might have used to restructure the shareholder model of for-profit medicine, a model that dates to the 1980s and corporate America’s turn toward putting shareholders above the public good. Instead, taxpayer money flowed to a small group of capitalists with almost no strings attached and little transparency. The contracts are redacted, although Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests are pending.
As cities across the nation started vaccinating at the end of 2020, the media sought out and hailed some of the researchers as heroes. And they are heroes. But most researchers would not cash in. The NIH’s Barney Graham, whose work on molecular protein manipulation is key to the Moderna vaccine, gets paid a government salary. Moderna execs, besides pocketing nearly a billion dollars, will still charge Americans for its vaccine.
Katalin Karikó, a Hungarian biochemist whose research was crucial in developing the BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine, doesn’t hold the patent for her discovery; the University of Pennsylvania does. BioNTech founders Ugur Sahin and Özlem Türeci, however, have profited significantly. Today the married doctors (top) are billionaires, among Germany’s richest people. They sold their company Ganymed Pharmaceuticals in 2016 for $1.4 billion.
In 2020, the US government spent $18 billion on vaccine research, manufacturing, and logistics and approved two for use at the end of the year: the mRNA-platformed Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. The eleven-month concept-to-emergency-approval process set a record in American vaccine history. Nothing else even came close.
Besides the mRNA vaccines, US taxpayers had bet billions on Johnson & Johnson, Novavax, and AstraZeneca, the British company. Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca, like the Chinese and Russian vaccine efforts, were making vector vaccines—a newer vaccine model than the attenuated virus model in vogue since the days of the cowpox—using virus modified so that it can enter cells, but cannot replicate itself. The vector vaccines use viruses that the body is familiar with—usually an adenovirus that causes the common cold—to deliver genetic information about specific disease into cells.
In February 2021, Johnson & Johnson reported that its single-shot vaccine, made from an adenovirus carrying Covid spike protein DNA, had a 72 percent efficacy rate. AstraZeneca produced a vaccine also based on a manipulated adenovirus that was already in use in the United Kingdom by February, despite a series of clinical trial mishaps. Novavax, the small Maryland-based company that took $1.6 billion from the US government to produce a protein-based vaccine using material from the soap bark tree as an adjuvant, was bringing up the rear, but promised to have one hundred million doses available in the United States by summer.
By late 2020, a year after Covid showed up in Wuhan, 200 vaccines were in trials or already in use, according to the WHO—another world record in vaccine history. China’s Sinovac was first out of the gate with its inactivated Covid vaccine in June 2020. Another Chinese company, Sinopharm, started tests in the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and Brazil during summer and made its first sale to the UAE, which began manufacturing it. By early 2021, the UAE was second in the world (behind Israel) in the percentage of its population that had received a vaccination.
The Chinese vaccine dominated the global market, stepping into a soft power vacuum left by US isolationism and pandemic mishaps. By early 2021, three Chinese vaccines were approved and in use, manufactured by Sinovac, Sinopharm, and CanSino—all either based on the adenovirus model or the attenuated Covid virus. In August, Sinovac announced an agreement to sell forty million doses to Indonesia. In February, Hungary became the first European Union country to approve the Sinopharm vaccine for use—after the European Union faced shortages due to the European Commission’s inability to cut a deal quickly with vaccine makers in 2020.
In February 2021, the Russian Ministry of Health reported that a vaccine called Sputnik V, based on the vector platform, had a 91.6 percent efficacy rate. Mexico immediately authorized it for use. Canada, Turkey, and South Korea were all testing their own vaccines, and even Cuba had produced a viable vaccine and was reportedly offering it to tourists. Bharat Biotech’s inactivated virus vaccine was approved for emergency use in India. Meanwhile, the Serum Institute of India—the world’s largest vaccine-producing factory—was scheduled to manufacture one billion doses of vaccine, mostly for poorer nations.
To be sure, these endeavors did not all meet the standards that Moderna and Pfizer had set. Few in the Western world fully trust official Russian and Chinese numbers about anything. In January 2021, Brazil announced Sinovac’s efficacy at 78 percent. A week later, the country revised that to “above 50 percent”—still high enough to meet WHO goals, but the swing from high to merely adequate efficacy nonetheless gives us pause.
Inevitably, the race to the vaccine took on a nationalistic flavor. In August, Russian president Vladimir Putin announced on national state television that Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine (named after the USSR’s landmark launching of the world’s first artificial satellite—plus a “V” for vaccine) was “quite effective,” even though it hadn’t made it to a phase three trial. The Brits took to calling the Oxford-developed AstraZeneca shot “the English one,” and in Germany,
Pfizer—which received early German funding—was called “the German one” with pride.
But the challenge also spawned some intriguing collaborations, suggesting that the virus could inspire the notion of a brotherhood of nations and corporations on the fractious planet. Russia and the United Kingdom, for example, announced they were going to pool their adenovirus vaccines into a single vac- cine, to see if the combination amplified efficacy. GSK, based in Britain, and the French company Sanofi, usually competitors, joined forces, putting their combined Big Pharma financial and manufacturing capacity behind a vaccine. And, in March 2021, the White House brokered a collaboration to manufacture vaccines between Merck and Johnson & Johnson.
The flurry of research and collaboration has even led to scientists not just talking about but being on the verge of testing a pan-coronavirus vaccine made of nanoparticles studded with corona proteins, which would be effective against all coronaviruses—even the one that causes the common cold. Imagine a world without the common cold. Can vanquishing death and taxes be far behind?
Adapted from Virus by Nina Burleigh, published by Seven Stories Press. © 2021 by the author.
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