A Mismatch: Money and Vaccine

A friend, an MLA alum, told me over dinner that he and his wife were sick with the flu for more than five weeks during the holiday season. The obvious question was, “did you get the flu shot?” The predictable answer was (considering his wife is a pathologist at UCSF) “of course! We get it every year.” However, this year’s vaccine, anecdotally and news-wise (as reported last September in Scientific American), is a known mismatch with this season’s flu viruses (1). I became curious as to why we couldn’t develop a universal flu vaccine, or vaccines for other long known viral infectious diseases. What are the obstacles? Dr. Gregory A. Poland, Director of vaccine research in Mayo Clinic put it plainly to Donald G. McNeil in “Why Don’t We Have Vaccines Against Everything?”: “one is scientific, one is embarrassing” (2). The embarrassing one is the lack of willing investments in developing vaccines that could save lives.

 How much money does it take to develop a vaccine? Peter Hurford, a data scientist, made some rough estimates based on historical data: smallpox costed about $5.5M, while measles was roughly $38.3M, and rotavirus was expensive at $1,140M. He also estimated $24,500M would’ve been spent on developing an HIV vaccine by 2030 (3, 4). He also sourced from publicly available records the time it took to develop vaccines. Rabies vaccine took only four years while influenza took fourteen years and Hepatitis B was developed in thirty-eight years (4).

Vaccine development takes time, money, and scientific talent. Of the three obstacles, the easiest one to scale would be money. However, many companies are only interested in pursuing high-priced vaccines people in the developed countries demand. Viruses plaguing poor regions must wait for donor foundations. With the new coronavirus in Wuhan China, a global race to develop antiviral drugs and vaccine is on. If history is any indication, a coronavirus vaccine is still years away.

~~ You Jia Zhu

1. Helen Branswell, “Flu Vaccine Selections Suggest This Year’s Shot May Be Off the Mark”, Scientific America, Sep 30, 2019.

2. Donald G. McNeil, Jr. “Why Don’t We Have Vaccines Against Everything?”, New York Times, Nov 19, 2018.

3. Peter Hurford, “How much does it cost to research and develop a vaccine?” Effective Altruism Forum, Feb 23, 2018.

3. Peter Hurford, “How long does it take to research and develop a new vaccine?” Effective Altruism Forum, Jun 28, 2017.