COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers mounted a social media campaign to censor demands for a generic vaccine, just part of the pharmaceutical industry’s successful lobbying blitz to retain patents and make record profits, writes Lee Fang of The Intercept..Fang was given access to a series of internal Twitter documents relating to the vaccine and what he found is damning..The series of documents started in December 2020, when Nina Morschhaeuser, a lobbyist for Twitter in Europe, emailed colleagues that said drug maker BioNTech, along with the German government, had contacted her with news of an imminent “campaign targeting the pharmaceutical companies developing the COVID-19 vaccine.”.“The authorities are warning about ‘serious consequences’ of the action, i.e. posts and a flood of comments ‘that may violate (terms of service) as well as the ‘takeover of user accounts’ are to be expected,” wrote the lobbyist. “Especially, the personal accounts of the management of the vaccine manufacturers are said to be targeted. Accordingly, fake accounts could also be set up.”.“The campaign they were concerned about was the launch of an international push to force the drug industry to share the intellectual property and patents associated with coronavirus vaccine development,” writes Fang. “Making the patents available, in turn, would allow countries across the world to swiftly manufacture generic vaccines and other low-cost therapeutics to deal with the ongoing pandemic.”."But global drug giants saw the crisis as an opportunity for unprecedented profit," writes Fang. "Behind closed doors, pharma launched a massive lobbying blitz to crush any effort to share patents/IP for new COVID-related medicine, including therapeutics and vaccines.".BIO, the lobbying group for biopharma, including Moderna and Pfizer, demanded the Joe Biden administration place sanctions on any country that tried to violate its patent and make generic low-cost COVID medicines or vaccines..In a different action, Fang reports BIO gave full funding of $1.3 million to a content moderation campaign to set rules for Twitter for COVID "misinformation.".While many of the tweets the campaign focused on were "truly unhinged misinfo, like claims that vaccines include microchips," Fang writes, others "were more of a grey area, like vaccine passports & vaccine mandates, policies that coerce vaccination.".But the effort to remove COVID misinformation did not apply to the drug companies themselves.."When big pharma wildly exaggerated the risks of creating low-cost generic COVID vaccines," they were not flagged, according to Fang. "The rules applied only to critics of industry.".Morschhaeuser flagged the corporate accounts of Pfizer, BioNTech, Moderna, and AstraZeneca for her colleagues to monitor and shield from activists. .She also asked colleagues to monitor the hashtags #PeoplesVaccine and #JoinCTAP, a reference to the World Health Organization’s Covid-19 Technology Access Pool, a program promoted by developing countries to accelerate the development of vaccines through the equitable sharing of research and manufacturing capacity. .“It is not clear to what extent Twitter took any action on BioNTech’s request,” writes Fang. “In response to Morschhaeuser’s inquiry, several Twitter officials chimed in, debating what action could or could not be taken. Su Fern Teo, a member of the company’s safety team, noted a quick scan of the activist campaign showed nothing that violated the company’s terms of service, and asked for more examples to “get a better sense of the content that may violate our policies.”.“But it shows the extent to which pharmaceutical giants engaged in a global lobbying blitz to ensure corporate dominance over the medical products that became central to combatting the pandemic. Ultimately, the campaign to share COVID vaccine recipes around the world failed.”.In November the Bureau of Investigative Journalism published a lengthy report showing that pharmaceutical companies went to great lengths to stifle efforts to share pandemic-related patents and IP, including threats to the leadership of Belgium, Colombia, and Indonesia. .The World Trade Organization asked for a waiver on the patents to facilitate the rapid creation of generic pandemic medicine. BioNTech made an aggressive effort to build support from the German government in opposing the waiver at the WTO, and until May 2021, the Biden administration opposed the waiver..“The largely successful assault against the creation of generic vaccines resulted in an unprecedented explosion in profit for a few select biopharmaceutical drug interests,” writes Fang. “Pfizer and BioNTech generated a staggering $37 billion in revenue from its shared mRNA vaccine in 2021 alone, making it one of the most lucrative drug products of all time.”.“Moderna, which made $17.7 billion from vaccine sales in 2021, recently announced its plan to hike the price of its COVID shot by about 400%.”.“The high cost of vaccines and concentrated ownership meant supplies in 2021 were hoarded in the European Union, United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Japan, and other wealthy countries, while much of the developing world was forced to wait for excess vaccines the following year.”
