Will taking down big pharma be easier than taking down big tobacco??

 3-3-21    Meet Director Jeremy Farrar of Wellcome Trust.  In addition to its work through WHO, Wellcome also influences the pandemic response through Farrar’s position on the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies advising the UK government on covid-19, as well as his board seat on the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, a leading public-private partnership in the pandemic that has pledged more than $1bn to covid-19 vaccine development.8   He also features frequently as an expert in the news media, including The BMJ, where he has cited the potential of specific drugs against covid-19.910  These advisory and media activities seem to overlap with Wellcome’s £28bn endowment, which has at least £1.25bn invested in companies working on covid-19 vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics:  Roche, Novartis, Abbott, Siemens, Johnson & Johnson, and—through its holdings in the investment company Berkshire Hathaway—Merck, AbbVie, Biogen, and Teva.11

On the basis of this limited public reporting Wellcome seems to be expanding its covid related investments, reporting last summer nearly two million shares in Abbott Laboratories, a major supplier of covid-19 diagnostic tests.14  Wellcome’s regulatory filings state that, from July to October 2020, the value of its 1.95 million shares in Abbott increased from $178m to $212m, a windfall for the non-profit charity.15   Wellcome reports gains of £3.3bn from all investments in 2020, three times more money than the trust gave away in charity.13

Despite the outsize role that private charities play in the pandemic response, their financial interests have been little scrutinised, likely because foundations are not subject to the same oversight mechanisms as public institutions.

Linsey McGoey, a professor of sociology at the University of Essex, who has written extensively on accountability in philanthropy, views Wellcome’s and Gates’s pharma investments in the context of their support for the prevailing market mechanisms driving modern medicine—which has translated into wealthy nations getting priority access to covid-19 drugs.25   Many stakeholders are challenging this economic model during the pandemic, McGoey notes, including pressure put on the World Trade Organization to relax intellectual property restrictions related to vaccines and therapeutics.26    She says “They seem to be wholly committed to a charitable model . . . [that] seems to really conflict with the health justice and vaccine justice approach that most global south activists and policy makers are calling for.  “These foundations sort of perpetuate the false ideological impression that they are . . . solving the problem even when they’re not.  And they might be compounding it by perpetuating this ideological impression of private sector saviourism.”    https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n556

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TAKING DOWN BIG TOBACCO:      Dr. David Kessler is the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration under both Presidents Bush and Clinton.  He began looking into the regulation of nicotine as a drug and was instrumental in convincing Clinton to enact tough federal regulation of tobacco. The tobacco industry fought this in a North Carolina court and the FDA won.  Kessler has been generally opposed to settlement with the tobacco industry and supports tough legislation against advertising to children.

In July 1997 Kessler became the Dean of the Yale University School of Medicine.  Extraordinary, detailed interview with Kessler conducted in March 1998 at link:  https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/settlement/interviews/kessler.html

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