Isn’t it appalling that Big Bad Pharma is going to make a profit off of the coronavirus vaccine? Don’t we desire, in fact insist upon, a world which is fair?
It is an argument coming from some on the Left: If only we had used governments and secluded ourselves from all that capitalism and profits stuff, then we would be better off.
This is, of course, drivel. For in a time of emergency, what we want is an efficient response, not a “fair” one. The profit-driven, private sector companies have produced for us a series of vaccines faster than anyone has ever done so before. Sure, government put together Operation Warp Speed, and that helped. But it didn’t create the universe capable of doing the work. That was the result of decades of market activity.
Months back, there were myriad different vaccine discovery processes underway. At that point, we knew nothing about which would be successful. So, there’s market competition for you. It isn’t, and wasn’t, possible to determine which vaccine candidate should be prioritized. The best emerged from trying everything. You know, like those 23 deodorants, or 18 types of sneakers, that Sen. Bernie Sanders says we don’t need.
The first vaccine to gain authorization was Pfizer’s, whose CEO insisted on not taking money from the U.S. government. It would come with strings attached, and who needs bureaucratic second-guessing when you’re trying to do something? Sure, it’ll make a profit somewhere down the line, but then bringing forward vaccinations by even a day saves the rest of us tens of billions, that cost stemming each day of a continuing pandemic.
The very fact there is a profit-seeking pharmaceutical sector, with all the wastefulness of market competition, is exactly what gave us those hundreds of teams of experts to work on the problem.
Remember, we have the European example of fairness. The European Union refused to purchase more vials of German vaccine because it would only match the amount of French vaccine it had bought, all in the name of being fair to producers in the constituent nations.
This is an example of what not to do, of course, rather than a useful course of action. It’s something like how the Food and Drug Administration messed up matters. At one point, the agency even banned a home test for COVID-19 on the grounds that people might actually test themselves without the permission of a doctor’s prescription.
We can even agree, if we wish, with certain of the criticisms of this free market approach. Sure, greed isn’t all that becoming a human trait. The lust for profits can be unseemly. Perhaps matters would be better if we all were motivated by the general good rather than the personal.
Yet, these are human beings we are talking about, for whom greed and lust are very powerful incentives. They do in fact “work,” as they have done here.
When push comes to shove, when something really must be done, and fast, the market is the thing that gets the job done. It is true, then, that some things are just too important for us not to rely on market incentives.
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. You can read all his pieces at The Continental Telegraph.
