Vaccine : Biotech 1 : Demagogy 0

Three lessons for the business and the common good issue.

(Imperfect) translation of the paper published by Marc Guyot and Radu Vranceanu, in La Tribune on 31/12/2020. See: https://www.latribune.fr/opinions/tribunes/vaccin-biotech-1-demagogie-0-869534.html

The outbreak of SARS-COV-2 that causes the Covid19 disease, started in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, to wreck the planet. A year later, there were almost 1.8 million deaths attributed to the Covid19 and many infected people had serious after-effects. The number of related deaths due to the congestion of health care systems is not yet known. Furthermore, the pandemic brought a collapse of worldwide economic activity unmatched since the Second World War.

With this year of hindsight, some useful lessons can be learned even as the usual catastrophists and detractors of the system have material to develop their own theories. Unsurprisingly (or shamelessly), they blame capitalism and global warming for the pandemic. Universal income, of course, becomes the absolute weapon to combat the virus and so is the control over the proliferation of pangolins.

More seriously, this pandemic has given rise to a technological and organizational feat that has its equivalent only in the Moon-landing race. At the outburst of the epidemic the possibility of creating a vaccine in less than a year was an event deemed impossible. Here, we are incredulous observers of the emergence of three vaccines in the West (BioNTech & Pfizer, Moderna, Astra Zeneca & Oxford University) that should effectively combat the pandemic if governments succeed in effectively organizing the logistics.

As of March 2020, almost no one believed in the ability of scientists and pharmaceutical companies to produce a vaccine for several years. The experts relayed 24h/24h by the media explained to us - hand on the heart and mask on the face - that it takes on average 10 years to develop a vaccine. The solutions recommended were therefore those that had been proven in the Middle Ages - locking up the population, to reduce contacts. Even though this virus was much more dangerous for the elderly, our leaders, improvised as autocrat apprentices, followed this recommendation and locked everyone up, assuming the hand on the heart (and eyes too) the destruction of certain parts of the economy and the undermining of education.

For their part, the small group of scholars who for the past twenty years had made progress in understanding the use of RNA as a vector of cellular information saw Covid19 as a field of application for their studies. The German company BioNTech and the American company Moderna have embarked on this highly risky project, driven by confidence in their theoretical model and some previous successes in the fight against cancer.

To the extent that this was niche research, experts in epidemiology and immunology had never taken it too seriously. In particular, the work of Katalin Kariko and Drew Weisman had met with only a limited audience. Yet they had the key to a new therapy and the most promising vaccine anti-covid19. Asked by Moderna and BioNTech, Katalin Kariko finally went to work at BioNTech, the company created in 2008 by two other visionaries of this treatment, Uğur Şahin et Özlem Türeci. In May 2020, the multinational Pfizer trusted them and invested heavily in the development of an anti-covid19 vaccine based on their technology. The American company Moderna, followed the same research strategy, around messenger RNA. It has benefited from numerous private donations and a massive direct investment of $1 billion by the U.S. government through the Warp Speed program of the Trump Administration.

Donald Trump is the only world leader who has not succumbed to panic over the rapid spread of the virus. While it closed air traffic with China very quickly, his decentralized approach to restrictions would have caused widespread contamination and was widely criticized. On the other hand, he believed from the beginning in the ability of scientists to quickly find a vaccine: in the end, he was right and the official epidemiologists were wrong and the two mRNA-technology vaccines - Moderna and BioNTech - were approved in many countries before the end of the year as predicted by Donald Trump. In anticipation of the availability of these vaccines, the Trump administration has also invested heavily in vaccine storage and transport logistics, which will allow the vaccine to be administered faster than in many other countries.

One lesson to be learned from this crisis is that the mobilization of people in science and management in an open and innovative spirit of radical disruption can upset the conventional beliefs and certainties of our public representatives and politicians. In fairness, they are not to blame as the spirit of start-ups, biotechs and business flexibility is foreign to them. Is not a “nation start-up” the one which just claims it, while persisting in imposing rules after rules set by a bunch of bureaucrats, and this is our second lesson. Supporting disruptive science requires a complex but organized network of state-of-the-art higher education and research institutions, public or private, open and risk-tolerant private financing structures, rapidly mobilizing public funds, and a free enterprise culture and incentives.

It is important to note that these two start-ups, BioNTech and Moderna, are for-profit companies. They are not "mission firms" with a stated goal to care about the common good. This has not prevented them, in less than a year, from making available to humankind the vaccine against Covid19, one of the greatest scourges since the Second World War. The Oxford University Laboratory, a private, non-profit organization allied with the multinational AstraZeneca, is a dignified account of the purpose and quality of academic research capable of allying itself with a privately-owned firm. A company is at the service of Society, without the need to specify it in a mission letter, as long as it delivers to the public the goods and services the later needs. This is probably more salient when the good is the vaccine against the scourge.

The specifics of BioNTech's vaccine requires a chain of super cold at -70 degrees Celsius which poses challenges at all levels of supply and delivery. Thermo King, a company specialized in cold generation and a subsidiary of the American Trane Technologies, has managed in less than 3 months to adapt the on-board cold systems for transporting tuna, from -60 to -70 degrees Celsius, thus matching the requirement for the safe transportation of the vaccine, and thus also contributing to the common good.

For a firm, to be at the service of society, simply means to do its job according to a high standard of quality, and this our third lesson. There is a clear illustration of the point that corporate ethical behavior does not depend exclusively on individual determination but is embedded in the structure of the free society without even the humans having a clear awareness of it. Every person who, in his/her workplace, performs the right gesture, the right action, makes the right choice, the right investment -- contributes to the well-being of the Society without the need for explicit global ethical commitment or knowledge of its overall impact, provided that the system is healthy. This is the contribution of great thinkers such as Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek to humankind.