On October 12, Jason Cone, the
Executive Director of Doctors Without Borders in the United States, published
an article explaining why the organization decided to reject an offer of a
million free vaccines. Pfizer, an American global pharmaceutical
corporation, offered a million free vaccines against pneumonia, the leading
cause of childhood death in most parts around the world. Why did they refuse?
Because they do not believe that the extremely high cost of the vaccines is
morally right and Doctors Without Borders saw this gift as a helpful gesture
that would be very short-term. Since Pfizer is one of two pharmaceutical
companies that produce the pneumonia vaccine, it is able to sell the price for
a high price and make high revenue—last year the vaccine generated $6.245
billion for the corporation. Jason Cone mentioned in his
article how “ we have been trying to negotiate with the companies to lower the
price of the vaccine, but they offered us donations instead” and further along
states that “Free is not always better.” A donation as generous as one million
vaccines would most likely not be completely free since it would have a lot of
strings attached to it like restrictions on who can and cannot receive the
vaccine and would, more importantly, be a reason as to why Pfizer would state
that the vaccine price must increase for everyone else.
Donations to low-income countries,
while helpful, can also lead to shortages since the donator can stop its supply
when and where it wishes. Therefore, Jason Cone believes that having the
corporation lower their prices for organizations like Doctors Without Borders
would be a much more helpful solution than giving a finite supply of free
vaccines. He states that vaccines should not be a luxury when these vaccines
can be the source of hope for thousands of children across the globe. Hopefully
Pfizer decides to lower the vaccines and therefore truly create a global change
to child health.
Read Jason Cone’s article here: http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/article/there-no-such-thing-%E2%80%9Cfree%E2%80%9D-vaccines-why-we-rejected-pfizer%E2%80%99s-donation-offer-pneumonia
--Jeanette Rios
No comments:
Post a Comment