During the COVID-19 pandemic, pharmaceutical companies—keeping to World Trade Organization policy—limited the international roll-out of free or low-priced vaccines, placing billions of citizens of low-income nations at risk for severe illness. When Canada was rolling out its third booster, fewer than 10% of Africans had been vaccinated. Drug companies defended their patents, and wealthy nations, where those companies had headquarters, vaccinated widely. The 1994 Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights had created a near-uniform global system of glut and deprivation once manufacturing was in place. Lifting patents would have required a waiver of intellectual property protection and resulted in less profit, so market-driven economies relentlessly commercialized science even in a pandemic. Pfizer earned $37 billion for its COVID shot in the first year of roll-out, one of the most lucrative products ever. In the best instances, financial incentives spur innovation. Is the COVID-19 pandemic the largest scale case study of over-commercialization to the detriment of global health?
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