Capitalism Is What Will Defeat Covid
Behold the paradox of this pandemic moment: Large corporations are political villains, derided on the left and right. Yet the main, and perhaps only, reason the Covid-19 scourge is easing is vaccines developed by Big Pharma.
Few are more acutely aware of this paradox than
Alex Gorsky,
CEO of
the healthcare device, pharmaceutical and consumer-goods company best known for products like Band-Aids and Tylenol. Politicians have vilified his industry over prescription-drug prices, and trial lawyers for using talc in its baby powder, which it discontinued in North America in 2020. But now J&J is a household name in the best way for developing its single-shot Covid vaccine, which the Food and Drug Administration approved for emergency use last month. The vaccine is increasing the U.S. supply of shots at a critical time and will enable a billion people world-wide to be vaccinated this year.
J&J’s road to the vaccine—from failure to life-saving success, from investment write-off to breakthrough—is a little-known story about science, business risk and innovation. There are also lessons for those who think capitalism is merely about rapacious profit.
“We would never be in the position where we are today if we had not invested billions of dollars over decades so that we could respond,” Mr. Gorsky, 60, says in an interview the Monday morning after the FDA authorized its Covid vaccine. The U.S. Army veteran had been up since 3:30 a.m., getting in one of his early-morning workouts before meetings. J&J’s Covid-19 vaccine development over the last year has been a sprint, but the process that led to it has been a decades-long marathon.
Vaccines such as those for polio, MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) and seasonal flu have been made from weakened or inactivated viruses. But patients often produce a weak immune response to the inactivated viruses, and shots that use weakened viruses can make immunocompromised people sick. The manufacturing process is also laborious.
Scientists over the past couple of decades have been studying a potentially more efficient and effective method known as a “vector vaccine”: using genetically engineered viruses to prime the immune system by delivering parts of a pathogen’s genetic code into human cells. Our cell machinery then manufacturers the dopplegangers. The harmless look-alikes trigger an immune reaction, marshaling antibodies and white blood cells. When the real pathogen invades, the immune system is prepared.
“Your body has multiple layers of response in these situations. There’s the immediate response, and there’s the longer term response,” Mr. Gorsky says. “Your body recognizes the virus and begins producing antibodies, as well as T-cell and B-cell response.”
B-cells produce antibodies that act like sentinels and prevent infection. T-cells provide backup if a virus penetrates the antibodies’ frontline defense and help enlist white blood cells into action. Antibodies can fade after a few months, but T-cells stick around longer and have something of a photographic memory. Some people who were infected with SARS in 2002-04 were found to have T-cells that remembered the virus a decade later.
J&J’s vaccine was found to be 72% effective at preventing moderate to severe Covid symptoms (meaning two or more symptoms that don’t require hospitalization) in U.S. trials. That’s less than the 95% of the Moderna and
-BioNTech vaccines, which received emergency-use authorization earlier, and which are followed by a booster a few weeks after the initial shot. But the trials aren’t directly comparable. For one thing, J&J’s trial occurred later, in the fall and early winter, when more virus variants were circulating. Some variants with changes to their spike protein, which helps the virus infiltrate human cells, appear to partly elude the antibody response.
T-cells aren’t as easily tricked. One reason scientists are excited about J&J’s vaccine is that its one shot induces a robust T-cell response. This means immunity is likely to last longer—how long remains to be seen—and less likely to be defeated by new variants.
Mr. Gorsky attributes the strong multilayered immune response from J&J’s vaccine to its innovative adenovirus-vector platform, AdVac, which it has developed over a decade.
Adenoviruses like those that can cause the common cold—so named because they were first isolated in human…
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