https://www.healthaffairs.org/It Was The Government That Produced COVID-19 Vaccine SuccessIt Was The Government That Produced COVID-19 Vaccine SuccessThe success of the US COVID-19 vaccine effort didn’t happen on its own; it was enabled by decades of long-term investments by the federal government, followed by additional federal investment in the development of the COVID-19 vaccines themselves. The government invested extensively in every aspect of the basic science, preclinical development, and clinical trials for the vaccines; it executed procurement contracts that were critical to creating successful vaccines and ensuring they were available to the US public.
In the case of vaccines in general, the government often plays an outsized role, but in the era of COVID-19 the government’s role was even more central than usual. The government essentially removed the bulk of traditional industry risks related to vaccine development: a) scientific failures, b) failures to demonstrate safety and efficacy, c) manufacturing risks; and d) market risks related to low demand.
Since 2000, taxpayer dollars have financed the development of various vaccine platforms for HIV, pandemic flu, and other threats to public health. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the government leveraged investments in those platforms in three ways. First, it supported additional preclinical studies. Second, it absorbed the bulk of human testing costs and risk through a set of contracts that paid for the various phases of vaccine development and manufacturing. And third, it reduced manufacturing risk by underwriting capacity investments.
Estimates of direct public spending on the development and manufacturing of COVID-19 vaccines vary considerably based on the range of sources examined and the timing of data collection. Recent estimates from the Congressional Research Service, the Government Accountability Office, and Chad Brown and Thomas Bollyky along with data on the GHIAA.org and Devex websites provide government spending estimates of between $18 billion and $23 billion. Most recently the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the Biomedical Research and Development Authority (
BARDA) alone has spent $19.3 billion on COVID-19 vaccine development. In addition, Lisa Cornish projected $39.5 billion in US spending.
These funds, which have attenuated industry risk in developing COVID-19 vaccines, are on top of years of government-funded vaccine research that set the platforms for the current successes.
Likewise,
BARDA has for years invested in the messenger RNA (or mRNA) platform for vaccine development, the technology used in the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines. Since 2006, Congress has appropriated hundreds of millions of dollars that
BARDA used to develop the scientific infrastructure to produce vaccines in response to the threat of pandemic flu. Thus, the basic research undergirding the COVID-19 vaccines was largely publicly supported.
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