Warp...

 

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 daily medicines, they are not profitable. 

The White House needed a whopping amount of money to coax companies to research and test and then produce hundreds of millions of doses. 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. 

 The price per double shot about forty dollars is comparable to the price per shot of the flu vaccine.  The government had ordered three hundred million doses from Moderna.

So a cost of few billion dollars, saves trillions. Is Alzheimer's next?