Big Pharma likes to hype the monopoly-based patent system as “the most effective tool to reward and incentivize innovation.” But the industry’s boosterism overlooks an important fact, which has been laid bare during the COVID-19 pandemic: lifesaving medications often are developed with the help of taxpayer money. Drugmakers then obtain lucrative patents and charge abusively high prices to the very people whose tax dollars helped develop the drug.

Consider the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which has played a singular role in developing new treatments and vaccines against coronaviruses. Reports show that the NIH has invested nearly $700 million in coronavirus research and development since the 2002 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). The US government funneled millions of dollars to Moderna alone as early as 2013 to develop its mRNA technology. When the new coronavirus emerged in Wuhan, the NIH worked with the company to design and test the mRNA-1273 vaccine. Other COVID vaccines have similarly benefited from substantial public funding by federal agencies and foreign governments: AstraZeneca (with Oxford University), Johnson & Johnson, Merck (with the International AIDS Vaccine Initative), and Pfizer (with BioNTech).

Research from the watchdog organization Public Citizen (full disclosure: I work for the group) shows that well before the COVID-19, the US Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Defense, and the governments of Canada and Germany contributed hundreds of millions of dollars and scientific expertise to develop new vaccine technologies and manufacturing facilities. Big Pharma, meanwhile, stood on the sidelines.