Pfizer goes it alone on COVID vaccine in 2020, just as it did with Penicillin in 1944 !

the UPJOHN COMPANY has a website devoted to its WWII medical supplies production that would get an A+ from any historian or archivist !

Pfizer did not “make” its penicillin all by itself, anymore than Ford “makes” its cars all by itself. This grimy bit of machinery was something Pfizer lacked and the Upjohn company had in spades : so much of Pfizer’s penicillin powder actually arrived to the end user inside a Upjohn labelled bottle : supply chains really do matter.

It is hard to believe that a corporate memory can extend back over 75 years, but Pfizer’s recent actions brings that into question.

Pfizer in 2020 chose to remain at the very outer edges of Trump’s OPERATION WARPSPEED just as it did in 1944 with the OSRD-led obsession ‘to take as long as we have to synthesize penicillin and patent it, before we deliver to WWII’s dying troops and civilians’.

Pfizer marched to a different drummer : seeing natural (patent-free) penicillin as cheaper, quicker and easier to make than the delusion of synthetic patent-able penicillin.

(And they were proven right, time & again : Penicillin still hasn’t been commercially synthesized 90 long years after this ‘synthetic autarchy’ obsession began !)

Thus Pfizer took none of Trump’s money (er the American taxpayers’ money) and shared relatively little production information with his Covid team. Just as it did in 1943-1944.

It simply promised to (A) deliver a safe effective vaccine as quick as it could and to (B) sell as much of it as possible to Trump’s government as the government wanted. 

(A) it did - in spades.  As it did in the Spring of 1944 - delivering 80% of the entire world’s penicillin - including almost all of the stuff that landed on the D-Day beaches. Many of us are here today solely because grandpa got some Pfizer penicillin when he really needed it.

But regarding (B) : Trump, his nose badly out of joint, declined the initial offer from Pfizer and now his team is playing catch-up - now willing to use the War Production laws to force suppliers to focus all-in on getting materials that Pfizer needs to really up production.

But don’t hold your breath :  Republicans are generally loath to force businessmen to do anything, even when lives depend upon it : in WWII as in 2020...