Speaker 1: I'm Carol Mass, Sir. The Bloomberg Business Week cover story
Speaker 1: this week is about how so much went terribly wrong
Speaker 1: this year, but at least one thing went right. Fiser
Speaker 1: and Maderna both got their vaccines across the finish line,
Speaker 1: baring surprises. By spring, tens of millions of Americans will
Speaker 1: have receive shots. By summer, if there will be hundreds
Speaker 1: of millions, more lives will be saved, economies will recover.
Speaker 1: It's an achievement worth celebrating, a shining example of people
Speaker 1: understanding what their job really is than doing it. It's
Speaker 1: also a story that highlights just how badly the US
Speaker 1: screwed up almost everywhere else. This episode is brought to
Speaker 1: you by Principal Financial Group, combining actionable insights with specialized
Speaker 1: solutions to help you meet your investment goals. Get to
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Speaker 1: With a big hand from the government, pharmaceutical companies delivered
Speaker 1: the vaccine that the world desperately needed. Here's how something
Speaker 1: went right for a change by Drew Armstrong. At the
Speaker 1: end of before the coronavirus pandemic started, the two best
Speaker 1: known faces of the pharmaceutical business were the imprisoned Martin
Speaker 1: Screlly and the lawsuit laden opioid makers at Purdue Pharma.
Speaker 1: The rest of the industry was perhaps best known for
Speaker 1: the skyrocketing prices of its medicines. In a gallop pole
Speaker 1: of the public's view of various business sectors, pharma was
Speaker 1: ranked at the bottom, behind the oil industry, advertising in
Speaker 1: public relations, and lawyers. Who'd have guessed that a year
Speaker 1: later pharma would be getting credit for saving the world
Speaker 1: from cruise lines to meet backers. Business will have plenty
Speaker 1: to answer for in its handling of the pandemic, but
Speaker 1: this part of it worked. The COVID nineteen vaccines developed
Speaker 1: by the drug industry in partnership with governments will almost
Speaker 1: certainly prevent hundreds of thousands of American deaths and millions
Speaker 1: or around the world. They will revive trillions of dollars
Speaker 1: in economic activity, let grandparents see grandchildren, and finally bring
Speaker 1: an end to a year that has sing it together
Speaker 1: one last time as the ball drops over an empty
Speaker 1: Times Square. Really sucked. In a time when almost everything
Speaker 1: else went wrong, the vaccine effort was something that went
Speaker 1: mostly right. The quest started in early January, before most
Speaker 1: people in the US and Europe were even thinking about
Speaker 1: a pandemic. The biotechnology company Moderna had downloaded the genetic
Speaker 1: code for the novel coronavirus from researchers in China. Within
Speaker 1: a few days, scientists there had developed a vaccine with
Speaker 1: the U S National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases,
Speaker 1: the research agency led by Anthony Fauci. By mid March,
Speaker 1: they'd started a clinical trial. Feiser announced its own plans
Speaker 1: around the same time. A year and a half before,
Speaker 1: it had signed a deal with a German biotech company,
Speaker 1: io in Tech, that has similar messenger RNA technology to
Speaker 1: Maderna's that could, in theory, rapidly assemble and test vaccines.
Speaker 1: Like Maderna, the company's thought the technology could make it
Speaker 1: possible to quickly turn around a prototype. The world hasn't
Speaker 1: seen an emergency like this in one hundred years, says
Speaker 1: Stephen Joffey, the interim chairman of the Department of Medical
Speaker 1: Ethics and Health Policy at the Perlman School of Medicine
Speaker 1: at the University of Pennsylvania. We are lucky in the
Speaker 1: sense that the science was there. Other crucial pieces fell
Speaker 1: into place behind the scenes. For years, the research chiefs
Speaker 1: of the top pharmaceutical companies have had an annual gathering
Speaker 1: to talk about ways to speed up their work. As
Speaker 1: the COVID crisis got worse, about twenty drug companies started
Speaker 1: a working group with the National Institutes of Health and
Speaker 1: other government agencies, meeting every other week to look at
Speaker 1: potential therapies and coordinate clinical trials, says Paul Staffles, the
Speaker 1: chief scientific officer at Johnson and Johnson, which has a
Speaker 1: large scale COVID vaccine trial at expected to produce results
Speaker 1: in January. Those efforts would eventually be folded into what's
Speaker 1: now known as the Trump administration's Operation Warp Speed program.
Speaker 1: Warp Speed was revealed at the end of April, when
Speaker 1: the pandemic had killed close to sixty thousand Americans. The
Speaker 1: goal was to develop and produce enough shots to inoculate
Speaker 1: three hundred million Americans before the new year. Some companies,
Speaker 1: including Maderna and J and J would get direct funding
Speaker 1: for their efforts. Weiser got an agreement from the government
Speaker 1: to buy the vaccine it produced if it worked. Crucially,
Speaker 1: the government was shouldering some risk financing the advanced production
Speaker 1: of the experimental vaccines while clinical trials were still going on.
Speaker 1: The most risk averse people on Earth and the riskiest
Speaker 1: business on Earth is how US Health and Human Services
Speaker 1: Secretary Alex Asar describes the drug industry. Probably the most
Speaker 1: common words said in a farmer company are how do
Speaker 1: you d risk this? Asar, whose department helped over sea warps,
Speaker 1: says he understood how tricky a bet on vaccines can
Speaker 1: be for a business. These companies are looking at making
Speaker 1: the multibillion dollar investments in R and D and manufacturing capacity,
Speaker 1: he says, and they had just been through Zekea stars.
Speaker 1: They've been through mers viruses for which the pharmaceutical industry
Speaker 1: investigated vaccines that never saw the outside of a clinical
Speaker 1: trial before those outbreaks dissipated or were squashed. The government's
Speaker 1: backing let smaller players get in the game and take
Speaker 1: some riskier technologies forward. Smaller companies such as Moderna, don't
Speaker 1: have the resources to do this on their own, Joffey
Speaker 1: says of large scale clinical trials. Fiser, despite its corporate
Speaker 1: reputation as a rival consuming Shark, said it would offer
Speaker 1: up any excess manufacturing capacity it might have, potentially producing
Speaker 1: competitors vaccines. But even a company of J and J's size.
Speaker 1: It reported fifteen point one billion dollars in profits last year.
Speaker 1: Needs incentives to rapidly start up a costlyvaccine development and
Speaker 1: testing effort. Staffel says pharma companies could reasonably predict that
Speaker 1: COVID would be bad and that a vaccine would have
Speaker 1: a market, But to mobilize a billion, maybe two billion
Speaker 1: dollars to start manufacturing and do the R and D
Speaker 1: is daunting. He says, Well, we are big companies. Nobody
Speaker 1: can free up two billion dollars in their profit and
Speaker 1: law statement overnight. Moderna, Astra, Zeneca and other vaccine developers
Speaker 1: who joined warp Speed agreed to use similar structures for
Speaker 1: their clinical trials so they could easily be compared with
Speaker 1: one another, and so it would be easier to see
Speaker 1: clear winners. The government also put together a single safety
Speaker 1: board to oversee them, which pins Jaffey sits on. It
Speaker 1: was an unusual approach, but it let the safety monitors
Speaker 1: look for worrying side effects or problems that could show
Speaker 1: up in more than one trial. In usual circumstances, drug
Speaker 1: makers might design their experiments to show advantages over competitors
Speaker 1: or dodge a potential head to head analysis. Big Fiser
Speaker 1: and any Moderna both got their vaccines across the finish line.
Speaker 1: The shots cleared in December have been shipped out to
Speaker 1: states and are now going into people's arms. Barring surprises,
Speaker 1: By spring, tens of millions of Americans will have gotten them.
Speaker 1: By summer, hundreds of millions more will have It's an
Speaker 1: achievement worth celebrating, a shining example of people understanding what
Speaker 1: their job really is then doing it. And it's not
Speaker 1: a story with a single hero. It's one about government
Speaker 1: scientists and private sector researchers. The trial volunteers who put
Speaker 1: their bodies on the line, the doctors running the trials,
Speaker 1: the FedEx and UPS workers making sure the vaccine is
Speaker 1: delivered during a pandemic winter, the nurses donning PPE to
Speaker 1: administer the shots, down to the first person being vaccinated
Speaker 1: after the FDA's authorization go through the chain. And that's
Speaker 1: who made this happen. But it's also a story that
Speaker 1: highlights just how badly the US screwed up almost everything
Speaker 1: else to do with controlling the pandemic. The nation had
Speaker 1: every asset needed to curb the virus, the world's best scientists,
Speaker 1: the biggest collection of biotechnology and pharma companies, a powerful government,
Speaker 1: and well established public health institutions. The US even had
Speaker 1: unlimited financing. Perhaps the one other thing policymakers got right
Speaker 1: is that they pumped enough money into the system to
Speaker 1: keep the economy alive. But even then, Congress was slow
Speaker 1: to strike a second relief deal, and Americans still ended
Speaker 1: up with a badly contained, deadly outbreak. Schools have gone remote,
Speaker 1: lots of restaurants will never reopen. Chances are you know
Speaker 1: somebody who was sick enough to be hospitalized or to
Speaker 1: have died. Michael Mina, an assistant professor of epidemiology at
Speaker 1: the Harvard TH H. Chan School of Public Health, believes
Speaker 1: that cheap, plentiful, rapid tests long ago could have done
Speaker 1: more to stop the pandemic than just about anything else
Speaker 1: we've done on over the past few months. While watching
Speaker 1: cases and debts stack up and hoping for a vaccine,
Speaker 1: the only way to deal with the virus like this
Speaker 1: appropriately is to try and identify people who are infectious.
Speaker 1: He says he's helped develop an inexpensive, mostly accurate test
Speaker 1: with rapid results that can be done on a strip
Speaker 1: of paper. It's not as accurate as the diagnostic tests
Speaker 1: you have to wait hours in line for and often
Speaker 1: days to get a result back from. But it costs
Speaker 1: pretty much nothing and is easy to make. We make
Speaker 1: more bags of doritos than I'm asking for, he says,
Speaker 1: of the number of tests needed. These are paper strips
Speaker 1: that get cut from one big piece of paper. His
Speaker 1: idea is that if you test like crazy, you can
Speaker 1: find enough cases to tell people who are infectious not
Speaker 1: to be out and about, and you halt a huge
Speaker 1: amount of transmission. There are people who aren't wearing a
Speaker 1: mask because of politics or whatever, Mina says, but they
Speaker 1: may still not want to get their eighty year old
Speaker 1: mom sick at Sunday dinner. He's pushed the idea to
Speaker 1: anyone who will listen, but it would need regulators to
Speaker 1: sign off and has never gotten off the ground. So
Speaker 1: where was the warp speed for testing? Fauci, who's been
Speaker 1: the face of the US response to the outbreak, or
Speaker 1: at least the face of what it could have looked like,
Speaker 1: said at a December ninth event at Harvard's School of
Speaker 1: Public Health, that is not as if a program of
Speaker 1: mass cheap testing would have been impossible to achieve. We
Speaker 1: have done things infinitely more complicated than that. He said,
Speaker 1: we have the technology, we can do it, which, when
Speaker 1: you think about it, brings up more questions. Where was
Speaker 1: the warp speed for contact tracing, for public health measures,
Speaker 1: for data, for making sure health care workers had protective gear.
Speaker 1: Where was the warp speed for keeping open businesses, churches,
Speaker 1: and schools? For everything that went wrong? Where was that
Speaker 1: combination of leadership and industry and money that could have
Speaker 1: made it go right. While we've been marveling rightly at
Speaker 1: the science that's made a vaccine possible, most of that
Speaker 1: other stuff never got going at the same level. HHS
Speaker 1: Secretary Asar says there was a national strategy for much
Speaker 1: of this. It just wasn't as visible as warp speed.
Speaker 1: But we're still facing a tough winter even with large
Speaker 1: scale vaccination efforts on the horizon. Tests are more common now,
Speaker 1: but hardly plentiful, at least not in the volume you'd
Speaker 1: need to truly use them for a broad, constant public
Speaker 1: health surveillance, the kind that would allow people on mass
Speaker 1: to go to school or work, travel on airplanes, or
Speaker 1: attend concerts or sporting events. In the New York City
Speaker 1: suburb where I live, my wife and I spent days
Speaker 1: trying to book a just to be sure COVID test
Speaker 1: before we headed south to visit relatives for Christmas. As
Speaker 1: I'm filing this to my editor, we're barreling down the
Speaker 1: interstate with plans to eat food out of a cooler
Speaker 1: p on the side of the road, and brave fourteen
Speaker 1: hours in a midsize suv with two small children, one
Speaker 1: of whom is disastrously vomit prone, all to preserve the
Speaker 1: little bubble of isolation we've kept up ahead of the trip.
Speaker 1: Even the uncomplicated things have been hard for much of
Speaker 1: the country. Not wearing a mask is seen as a
Speaker 1: political act by a significant portion of the population, unhelped
Speaker 1: by a mixed message from government leaders, some of whom
Speaker 1: have suggested that basically masks or for losers. We love
Speaker 1: to inject ourselves with stuff, but when it comes to
Speaker 1: simple messaging about health, doing something that would help people,
Speaker 1: we hate it. Mina says, we are very willing to
Speaker 1: mop up messes, but we have no willingness to stop
Speaker 1: them before they occur. There is one more opportunity to
Speaker 1: get a big thing right. The US gets credit for
Speaker 1: having pushed the development of the vaccines. Now it has
Speaker 1: to make sure people take them. First. The government has
Speaker 1: to guarantee there's enough vaccine. That was a key part
Speaker 1: of the goal of WARP speed. Since the program started,
Speaker 1: the US has signed deals for enough shots to cover
Speaker 1: five hundred and five million people, with the option to
Speaker 1: buy more, but it has only enough from Fizer so
Speaker 1: far for fifty million, and from Moderna for one hundred million.
Speaker 1: Other vaccines it's made deals for, such as Astrasenica's and
Speaker 1: JAY and Jay's, are still in development. There are growing
Speaker 1: concerns that the US, after leading development of vaccines, may
Speaker 1: not get them as fast as it had hoped. Instead
Speaker 1: of three hundred million covered by the end of twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: the US is now aiming to supply vaccine for twenty
Speaker 1: million people by the end of December and getting to
Speaker 1: a total of one hundred million by the end of February.
Speaker 1: Vaccinating all of America now looks more like an end
Speaker 1: of twenty twenty one goal. Even if there is enough vaccine,
Speaker 1: of course, people have to be willing to take it.
Speaker 1: If we have a ninety five percent effective vaccine and
Speaker 1: only forty percent to fifty percent of the people in
Speaker 1: society get vaccinated, It's going to take quite a while
Speaker 1: to get to that blanket of herd immunity that's going
Speaker 1: to protect us, Bauchi said at the Harvard event. Early
Speaker 1: on in the development of the vaccines, there was debate
Speaker 1: about whether to run what are known as challenge trials,
Speaker 1: in these healthy volunteers get an experimental vaccine and are
Speaker 1: deliberately exposed. It's an ethical razor's edge. Is it moral
Speaker 1: to give somebody a virus you know, kills a small
Speaker 1: percentage of patients with their best defense being a vaccine
Speaker 1: that isn't known to work. Because there weren't COVID therapies
Speaker 1: that could cure an infected patient, researchers passed on the
Speaker 1: idea it wasn't worth the chance that someone could die. Instead,
Speaker 1: the vaccine trials signed up tens of thousands of volunteers,
Speaker 1: split into those who got the real shot and those
Speaker 1: who got a placebo. To find out if the vaccine
Speaker 1: was effective, they had to go back out into the
Speaker 1: real world and bump into the virus on their own.
Speaker 1: The idea with these large trials, the gold standard for
Speaker 1: testing of vaccines efficacy and safety is that if the
Speaker 1: vaccine works. COVID cases rapidly accumulate in the group that
Speaker 1: got the placebo, but not in those who got the
Speaker 1: real thing. Get enough cases and you can perform a
Speaker 1: statistical analysis of exactly how effective the vaccine is. But
Speaker 1: if there isn't enough virus circulating, few in the trial
Speaker 1: get infected and results take longer. Over the summer, Visors
Speaker 1: and Maderna's trials went into lulls as the pandemic waned.
Speaker 1: Then in the fall, cases exploded. Millions of infections were
Speaker 1: tallied around the country, and thousands of people died, and
Speaker 1: the results started pouring in on the trials. Jay and
Speaker 1: j said in December it would shrink the size of
Speaker 1: its sixty thou person trial because the cases were coming
Speaker 1: in so fast. The US, because of its failure to
Speaker 1: control the pandemic, had essentially created one big challenge trial.
Speaker 1: There is an irony and a situation that we all
Speaker 1: hoped wouldn't have occurred. US Food and Drug Administration Commissioner
Speaker 1: Stephen Hans says the number of cases did help expedite
Speaker 1: the performance of clinical trials both here and abroad. That
Speaker 1: did help us get to this point, But I think
Speaker 1: of us would have wanted it to be that way.
Speaker 1: That's the contradiction of the USS vaccine success. The government
Speaker 1: and scientists, all working together, came up with a shot
Speaker 1: to save the world, and then they were able to
Speaker 1: prove so quickly that it worked only because those same
Speaker 1: institutions couldn't save us from ourselves. With Robert Langreth, and
Speaker 1: that is the Bloomberg Business Week cover story this week.
Speaker 1: Check out more stories in the magazine on newsstands, online
Speaker 1: at Bloomberg dot com and on the Bloomberg And be
Speaker 1: sure to check out Bloomberg Business Week Daily on Bloomberg
Speaker 1: Radio Monday through Friday, starting at two pm Wall Street Time,
Speaker 1: also on our podcast feed at Bloomberg dot com and
Speaker 1: on YouTube search Bloomberg Global News. I'm Carol Masser.