Last month, Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel issued a letter to the company’s shareholders effusively touting its accomplishments throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. “As our first approved product,” he wrote of Moderna’s COVID vaccine, “it has impacted hundreds of millions of lives around the world. . . .  We are harnessing the power of mRNA to create a new category of medicines and a company that maximizes its impact on human health.”

As the LA Times’ Michael Hiltzik pointed out, a few salient points were absent from Bancel’s lengthy exercise in corporate back-patting — notably the company’s plan to raise the price of its vaccine from $20.69 to as much as $130 per dose. Also missing, though likely not far from the top of Bancel’s mind, was the nearly $20 billion in vaccine-related profits projected late last year — a figure that will rise considerably if the planned price hike goes into effect. Pfizer, which also developed a vaccine using mRNA technology, is reportedly planning to do much the same and similarly reaped a windfall worth tens of billions from its vaccine in 2022.

If nothing else, drug companies may soon rediscover the deep-seated public antipathy they mostly elicited prior to the pandemic. COVID-19 represented an unprecedented PR coup for pharmaceutical giants like Pfizer and Moderna as tribunes of a widely hated industry, whose quickly developed vaccine technologies transformed them from corporate malefactors into chirpy meme fodder in the span of just a few months. Often missed was the role both played in maintaining patent monopolies that slowed down vaccine production. Similarly left out of the story was the extensive role played by the public sector in the development of major COVID vaccines. In the case of Moderna alone, this included not only over a billion in grants from the federal government that sheltered the company from risk but also the untold sums poured into federally funded research concerned with mRNA technology.