Let’s not let drug companies hold us hostage when pricing a covid-19 vaccine

By Joe Rothstein

When I was a child, the disease people feared most was polio. Polio didn’t savage populations the way covid-19 is doing now, but tens of thousands of children in the United States would fall ill with it each year, along a not insignificant number of adults. Most notably, one of those adult victims was president-to-be Franklin D. Roosevelt, when he was 39 years old.

Major polio outbreaks would start around Memorial Day and tail off about Labor Day. During summers, we feared going to movie theaters or swimming pools. No one knew what caused polio, but we did know it could strike without warning anywhere and everywhere.

Finally, in 1953, Dr. Jonas Salk announced that his research team had developed a polio vaccine. It was so effective, within a few years polio had virtually disappeared in the U.S. In the early 1960s, Dr. Albert Sabin’s research team introduced an oral polio vaccine, one that was much cheaper than Salk’s and easier to administer. For the next 30 years, Sabin traveled the world, promoting the vaccine’s use.

Salk and Sabin followed two different paths to get to the same result — near eradication of a dangerous viral disease. For much of that time they were rivals. But they had this in common: neither patented their vaccines. Salk, in an interview, said it would be like “patenting the sun.” A Forbes magazine analysis estimated that a patent would have been worth $7 billion to Jonas Salk.

Sabin waived off every attempt at exploitation by pharmaceutical companies because he wanted to keep the price low enough to…