The Economics of Vaccines | Big Think

The Economics of Vaccines

New videos DAILY

Join Big Think Edge for exclusive videos

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Pharmaceutical companies over the last couple of decades have been looking for blockbusters instead of incremental improvements.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Seth Berkley:

Seth Berkley, President and founder of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, is a medical doctor specializing in infectious disease epidemiology and international health. The author of over 85 publications, the opening line of one of his articles encapsulates his life's work: "History will not judge HIV/AIDS kindly...the harshest words will be reserved for how the world responded, or rather failed to respond, to the epidemic."

Prior to founding IAVI in 1996, Dr. Berkley was the Associate Director of the Health Sciences Division at The Rockefeller Foundation. Dr. Berkley is also an adjunct Professor of Public Health at Columbia University and an adjunct Professor of Medicine at Brown University. He received his undergraduate and medical degrees from Brown University and trained in Internal Medicine at Harvard University. He has worked for the Center for Infectious Diseases of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, and for the Carter Center, where he was assigned as an epidemiologist at the Ministry of Health in Uganda. He sits on a number of international steering committees and corporate and not-for-profit boards and has consulted or worked in over 25 countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

He is also an opinion leader, speaking frequently on health technology, development, AIDS and international health. In his words, "It is long past due to add HIV/AIDS to the list" of eradicated diseases.

Prior to founding IAVI in 1996, Dr. Berkley was the Associate Director of the Health Sciences Division at The Rockefeller Foundation. Dr. Berkley is also an adjunct Professor of Public Health at Columbia University and an adjunct Professor of Medicine at Brown University. He received his undergraduate and medical degrees from Brown University and trained in Internal Medicine at Harvard University. He has worked for the Center for Infectious Diseases of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, and for the Carter Center, where he was assigned as an epidemiologist at the Ministry of Health in Uganda. He sits on a number of international steering committees and corporate and not-for-profit boards and has consulted or worked in over 25 countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

He is also an opinion leader, speaking frequently on health technology, development, AIDS and international health. In his words, "It is long past due to add HIV/AIDS to the list" of eradicated diseases.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSCRIPT:

Seth Berkley: It’s interesting because vaccines used to be thought as not very profitable. The pharmaceutical industry much, much larger-- People when they’re sick of course will have a perception that they’ll pay more because they’re worried about being sick and wanting to get better. There’s nothing that’s more driving than when you feel sick to get treatment. Vaccines used to be seen as public health commodity things, things that were required by the state, relatively inexpensive and that’s beginning to change. There’s been a series of vaccines over the last few years that have come out, that have come out at high price in the west and have created very large markets. But the pharmaceutical markets over the last couple of decades have been looking for blockbusters. They’ve been looking for drugs and vaccines that make billions of dollars and so that hadn’t been the way of working. On top of that, you have a disease that is extremely difficult scientifically. We’ve talked about that. You’ve got a disease that the primary place where it’s spreading, 95% of the infections are in the developing world, and third, you’ve got a disease that’s politically controversial. It’s about sex. It’s about people who are arguing about this. It’s about intellectual property. And so you can rationally see why a company might say this isn’t the best place to invest our shareholders’ resources and so one of our great challenges has been to say this is a global public good. This vaccine will be important not only for the developing but also for the developed world. So how do we create incentives that will engage the best scientists, the best companies, the best groups in the world to focus on this problem? It isn’t going to happen in a natural market mechanism. We’ve got to create them and that’s really part of what we’re trying to do.

Read the full transcript at