COVID Vaccine Push and Drug Monopolies Produced 9 New Billionaires

The People’s Vaccine Alliance, a coalition of organisations, scholars, and activists, have published a press release which details the rise of nine new billionaires through production and sale of vaccines. Pharmaceutical companies have made an excessive amount of profits with their monopoly on the Covid-19 vaccines. These billionaires have amassed around $19.3 Billion combined, which according to the Alliance, “can vaccinate all people from low income countries 1.3 times”.

These new billionaires include-

1. Moderna’s CEO, Stéphane Bancel
2. BioNTech’s CEO,Ugur Sahin
3. Co-founder of CanSino Biologics, Zhu Tao
4. Senior vice president of CanSino Biologics
5. Qiu Dongxu; Mao Huinhoa senior vice president at CanSino Biologics
6. Timothy Springer who is an investor at Moderna
7. Moderna’s chairman, Noubar Afeyan
8. chairman of ROVI, a company that manufactures the Moderna vaccine, Juan Lopez-Belmonte
9. Robert Langer, a scientist and founding investor in Moderna

The Alliance also notes that, apart from the rise of nine new billionaires, existing billionaires have seen a rise in their overall wealth by more than $32 million, which is actually enough to vaccinate the entirety of the population in India.

The Alliance is pushing for vaccines to be produced without any intellectual property protections, and sold as global common goods, available to people of all countries, free of charge.

According to People’s vaccine alliance, the monopoly over vaccination and the prioritising of profits, has directly created a deadly situation world-wide, where protection against the virus is withheld from people by the work of billionaires who have succeeded in profiting out of a global pandemic.

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