The Jersey Journal ran a refreshing editorial titled Vaccine thanks -- for those who make ‘em, take ‘em and give ‘em out. The Journal opines:
What a difference a year makes.
Last Thanksgiving, most of us were hunkered down with just the members of our immediate household while phone calls, text messages, emails, FaceTime and Zoom helped us count our blessings with extended family and friends without risking a COVID super-spreader event.
Within weeks, vaccines started to get into arms and each month more and more people became eligible and rolled up their sleeves – and for that we are very, very thankful today.
The Journal offers Thanksgiving thanks to:
The scientists who developed the vaccines and who continue to develop increasingly effective treatments against COVID-19.
The Trump and Biden administrations for fast-tracking vaccine production and distribution.
The healthcare and administrative workers who get the shots into our arms.
And each and every person who has been vaccinated.
What’s missing from this list? The elephant in the room—the pharmaceutical companies.
Business corporations are the institutions that organize the factors of production, make the crucial decisions, do the planning, provide the industrial facilities, and figure out how to get products into the hands of consumers. Business is the crucial link between the laboratories of the scientists and inventors and the useful products available to the end users in the market. The thinking, planning, and decision-making work of the management, and the investors who put up the financial capital, are crucial to the vaccine success story. In a time when the most overused word in the English language is “hero”, the Pharmaceutical companies are the unsung genuine heroes that the Jersey Journal’s vaunted thankfulness overlooks.
“Big Pharma” should be prominently second on the list getting thanks. Profit-seeking business corporations are the unsung heroes not just of the pandemic but of the standards of living we enjoy, from the food we consume to the ability to make phone calls, text messages, emails, FaceTime and Zoom that we depended so much upon before the vaccines came along. It’s not that these others on the Journal’s list are not important to the productive process. It’s that without the commercialization services that business provides, there would be no one else to thank. Without these innovators, specifically the pharmaceutical companies—which, by the way, employ over 300,000 people in NJ—there would have been nothing for Trump and Biden to “fast-track” (relax obstructive government regulations of), and the vaccines would never have left the scientists’ labs, been produced by the hundreds of millions of doses, and gotten into the hands of the healthcare and administrative workers, let alone “our arms.” Imagine the $trillions of dollars in economic activity that would never have happened, the countless jobs that would not have come back, and the millions more who would have died, without Big Pharma.
So let me complete the Jersey Journal’s thank-you list. Thanksgiving thanks to the unsung heroes of the vaccine success story, the pharmaceutical companies who continue to make it possible to fight the pandemic.
Related Reading:
Menendez opposes fellow N.J. Democrat Pallone’s plan to lower drug prices By Jonathan D. Salant | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
Pfizer Will Earn Billions in Profits from the Vaccines. It Should Be Much, Much More. by Scott Lincicome for The Dispatch
Without “Big Pharma,” Government Research Would Be Useless
Pharma Shouldn’t Apologize to Useless Do Gooders for their Life-Saving Vaccines
Basic Cancer Research Funding: Don’t Forget Pharma
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