The COVID-19 pandemic has created an instant market for vaccine development. Around $1 billion of U.S. taxpayer funds have already been given to Big Pharma to develop the much coveted COVID-19 mRNA vaccine, a new class of vaccines that have never before been successfully developed.
At least another $2 billion is being spent by the Bill Gates-founded Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI).
And this is all just for starters, as over 100 COVID-19 vaccines are currently in development by most of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies. The CARES Act signed into law on Mar. 27, 2020 allocates $27 billion for COVID-19 vaccine development, just in the U.S. alone.
And if that wasn't enough, earlier this week (May, 2020) President Trump seemingly gave a blank check to spend as much as possible to fast track a COVID-19 vaccine through "Operation Warp Speed," a coalition of scientists, government officials, military agencies, and private companies led by Alex Azar, the Health and Human Services Secretary, and Mark Esper, the Defense Secretary.
Their goal: to deliver 300 million doses of coronavirus vaccine from November to December 2020 and another 300 million by January 2021.
So just by starting to research a COVID-19 vaccine, the already lucrative pharmaceutical industry just became the all-time most profitable industry on the planet.
As pharmaceutical companies compete with each other to get a COVID-19 vaccine to market, there was initial skepticism that an mRNA vaccine could be developed anytime soon. Projections were that it would take about 5 years, and even then only with a small chance of success.
Now, as we saw earlier this week with the announcement of the new "Operation Warp Speed" project, the projections are to produce enough vaccines to be able to inject all 350 million citizens of the United States by the end of 2020.
And on May 1st this week Moderna Therapeutics announced a partnership with Lonza manufacturing to start producing 1 billion COVID-19 vaccines a year.
Moderna Therapeutics is partnering with Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), who also has close ties to Bill Gates.
Bill Gates said in an interview this week that 7 billion vaccine doses are needed to end the COVID-19 pandemic, which is about the same number as the number of people living on the planet.
Will the entire world's population just volunteer to get this vaccine, or are the drug companies counting on the fact that they will become mandatory?
The world's largest manufacturer of vaccines, the Serum Institute of India, which produces 1.5 billion vaccine doses a year for an array of diseases, said it was not going to wait for approval of a COVID-19 vaccine, but would start manufacturing them immediately, starting with 40 million doses. They are currently working with the the Oxford Vaccine Group.
It would seem that pharmaceutical companies manufacturing a COVID-19 vaccine are banking on the fact that the World Health Organization will recommend that they be mandatory.
Will the U.S. comply?