Pfizer was BioNTech, developed in Germany. They might have also had Astrazeneca (UK) or any number of vaccines developed in tandem globally. Also, worth pointing out that healthcare is a separate and distinct industry from pharma. Co-dependent but dealt with under very different rules globally.
Yeah we live in a globalized world, corporations are global entities and companies from other countries made meaningful contribution. They still were predominately developed, tested, manufactured and distributed by US companies... thats why BioNTech had less than a billion of revenue last year to Pfizer's 7.5B Operating Income. You wouldn't have it at this scale without the so-called 'trash' US healthcare system.
> Do you think universal healthcare would affect pharmaceuticals?
Yes, I would think a massive fundamental change in the healthcare system would have an effect on Pharma. But who knows what that would look like
> I think it would not be relevant to the vaccines as we would still spend money on R&D under the pandemic threat.
They would spend money, but it's not hard to envision a world where we didn't have multiple fully tested, safe & effective vaccines in less than a year.
Rather it would be more relevant in the case of vaccines, becaase the reason we didn't have them was not because we didn't have the science, but because drug companies didn't see them as profitable.
A better hybrid public/private system would be for the government to put out bounties for companies to run large studies on research that looks promising, to determine effectiveness and optimize formulations. In return for paying for the research, government would get the patents. Paying for drug development with a patent reward only encourages deceit and high prices.
Dean Baker has explored this extensively, and is posting steadily about it recently:
The basic idea of government-funded research should not be hard to grasp since the government already funds a large share of biomedical research. The National Institutes of Health gets over $40 billion a year in federal funding, with the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Agency (BARDA) and other government agencies getting several billion more. This puts the government’s total spending in the $45 to $50 billion range, compared to a bit over $90 billion from the industry. So the idea that the government would fund research really should not be that strange.
Most of the public funding does go to more basic research, but there are plenty of instances where the government has actually funded the development of new drugs and also done clinical testing. But under the current system, most of the later stage funding does come from the industry and is funded through patent monopoly pricing. Relying on open-source government-funded research for later-stage development and testing would be a major change.
To my view, the best way for the government to support the development of new drugs is through long-term contracts (10-12 years), which would be awarded through competitive bids for research in specific areas, like cancer or heart disease. The plan would be that the contracts would be relatively large, with the idea that the winners would be comparable to prime contractors for the military.
There are significant problems but whose Vaccine did you take for Covid-19? Pfizer (Us), Moderna (US), Johnson and Johnson (US)...