Our editor is one of four co-authors of a groundbreaking COVID-response manifesto, “Reclaim Public Medicine for Public Health,” signed by dozens of public health organizations and experts. It can be read in full here.
The bottom line is this: By taking the vaccine industry into public ownership, embracing open science, and creating public-sector capacity for a full-cycle pharma process, we can far better respond to this and future pandemics.
Medicines were long considered a public good, off-limits to corporate profiteering, price-gouging, and monopolizing. There is a growing realization that it is time for us to reclaim them as such.