Shouldn’t a Vaccine That Stops a Global Pandemic Be Free

4 min readNov 15, 2020

This week, Pfizer giddily announced that preliminary results from a coronavirus vaccine trial they’re conducting suggest the vaccine is more than 90% effective. By comparison, influenza vaccines are typically 40 to 60% effective.

Preliminary findings also suggest that the vaccine is safe, so Pfizer is planning to ask the FDA for emergency authorization of the vaccine as early as this month.

Assuming the rest of the trial goes well, and with expedited FDA approval, Pfizer estimates they can have up to 40 million doses produced before the end of 2020.

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It looks extremely promising. I’m genuinely hopeful that production and distribution of a vaccine will mark the beginning of the end to this nightmarish pandemic.

But, beyond the standard concerns about the safety and efficacy of the vaccine, I’m worried about cost and accessibility. Our salvation sits squarely in the hands of for-profit companies who have the final say in how much the vaccine costs and, whatever they say publicly, their bottom line — not our well being — is their top priority.

I hope you can forgive me my skepticism. You see, I have firsthand experience with trying to get my insurance company to approve life-saving, but prohibitively expensive, drugs.

Once upon a time, in cancerland

Five years ago I spent my days micromanaging my daughter’s cancer treatment. It was not uncommon for me to spend weeks, or even months, trying to get our insurance company to approve the targeted chemotherapy drugs that my daughter’s pediatric oncologist prescribed to treat her rare tumor.

Her cancer had metastasized within six months of diagnosis (in 2012). By 2015, she had many tumors in her lungs and throughout her abdomen.

Targeted drugs that attack specific gene mutations had successfully slowed the progression of her disease, but the drugs always stopped working after a few months, so new drugs needed to be added or her existing dose revised. This required new prescriptions for very expensive drugs (one of the drugs she was on, Ibrance — developed by Pfizer — costs about $13,000 for 21 pills).

Needless to say (but I’ll say it anyway), it took much jumping through hoops to get our insurance company to approve prescription changes.

Once, after two weeks of appealing insurance company denials and finally getting approval, I was so effusively grateful to the insurance rep who called me with the news, that I totally freaked her out.

But she didn’t know that the drug in question was the third oral chemotherapy treatment that my daughter’s oncologist had prescribed in a year, or that each time we switched to a new drug, we were subjected to the agonizing process of waiting and worrying about getting insurance approval. She didn’t know that with every scan that showed cancer progression, we were running out of options.

The targeted drugs that extended my daughter’s life caused few side effects. She’d been able to take them orally at home. They’d been far more effective than the harsher chemotherapy she’d received when she was first diagnosed.

She’d obviously needed these drugs, but our insurance routinely denied them, requiring multiple appeals before approval, because they were so expensive. The question of why they cost so much wasn’t an easy one to answer, but I made it my mission to try.

Shouldn’t a Vaccine That Stops a Global Pandemic Be Free

Once upon a time, in cancerland

Written by Naomi Jones