The AstraZeneca vaccine was almost entirely financed by taxpayers and charitable trusts.
The multinational pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca drew immediate backlash Friday for announcing an end to its pledge not to profit from its publicly funded coronavirus vaccine until the end of the pandemic, which is still killing more than 7,000 people worldwide each day. Developed in partnership with the University of Oxford, the AstraZeneca vaccine was almost entirely financed by taxpayers and charitable trusts, with just around 2% of the money coming from private industry. Nick Dearden, director of the U.K.-based advocacy group Global Justice Now, said in a statement that “AstraZeneca’s decision to start profiting from Oxford University’s coronavirus vaccine mid-pandemic shows the utter folly of giving away publicly funded science to Big Pharma.” “The non-profit pledge was never a gift to the world from a benevolent company,” said Dearden. “It was the most Oxford could get from a manufacturer playing hardball during a global health emergency. And AstraZeneca has still refused to share the vaccine recipe with the [World Health Organization], which would allow poorer countries to manufacture it for themselves.
