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 Johnson & Johnson , 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.