Finding a vaccine also thanks to coronabonds

The Germans and northern Europeans don't want to hear about coronabonds. They are afraid that funds allocated by Europe for what in principle is a shared purpose, such as the fight against a pandemic, will be used differently. They fear that the money raised with the issuance of European securities will in effect become the sharing of too large a liability, that is, the obligation to repay the sovereign debt of the Mediterranean countries. They worry especially about Italy, whose public debt at the end of January 2020 had already reached 2,443 billion (approximately 135 percent of its GDP and 18 percent of the euro area GDP). Yet in recent weeks it has become clear that considerable public resources are needed to face the health and economic emergency that is advancing dramatically not only in Italy, Spain and France, but in all EU countries, as well as in the rest of the world.

To resolve this impasse, it would be useful to start by properly explaining the use to which at least a part of the funds raised with these securities could be put. With a well-specified objective, the risk of distortion in the use of funds would be greatly reduced and, presumably, the resistance of central and northern Europe weakened. Among the various possible objectives, there are some that derive from a clearly identifiable and measurable urgency; they require cooperation and come before all the rest. First, the need to develop a vaccine against this and other pandemics whose occurrence in the future can certainly not be excluded. Then, in the meantime, we need drugs that can at least slow the course of the disease and extend the life of the seriously ill, as happened in the case of HIV. Less vital, but of universal importance, is the need to find a serological test for antibodies to this virus, since there is still no fully reliable one and efforts are pursued privately by individual institutions. It would take a G20 initiative to work globally, but in the meantime we could start from Europe, which already has the appropriate institutions in place.  Given the demographic composition of the EU’s population, there is also a potential consensus to collect public resources to invest in extending life, particularly that of our elders. Europe, which has already lost the battle of digital transformation, could ultimately win this sudden and fundamental technological and social battle.

Then there is the "how" of the project implementation. It will not be a mega laboratory of scientists concentrated in Brussels to discover the vaccine, but rather one or more pharmaceutical companies or research centers that share the costs and results of research. The world of large research and development laboratories in multinational companies, that until a few years ago operated independently and jealously guarded patents related to innovation, hardly exists now. With the internet, the era of open science has begun, that is, knowledge has begun to flow freely among computers all over the world. And with it, open innovation has developed, the business practice that frees you from relying on your skills alone -  necessarily limited before the growing complexity of the problems we face – and enables you to make radical innovations thanks to sharing with third parties.

 Open science and open innovation are precisely what are required to discover and produce drugs, given that on average it takes fifteen years to go from a pharmaceutical product idea to its marketing, with costs that skyrocket for various reasons. There are drugs for every disease, but many of them are not marketable due to the unknown damage that innovative molecules could entail for the human body. Many drugs that pass preliminary testing in the biological field, do not, however, pass the human test phases that require other complex statistical validations. Moreover, their marketing is regulated differently from country to country even within the EU, precisely to protect that most precious of assets, public health. At the end of the nineties it cost an average of half a billion dollars to get a drug out on the shelves, but today that cost has tripled. 

In addition, finding a vaccine for coronavirus is objectively complex. As Maurizio Cecconi, Guido Forni and Alberto Mantovani wrote in the Covid-19 Report for the Accademia dei Lincei, "we have a long list of serious infectious diseases against which vaccines are only partially effective and we have a series of sensational failures". In addition, "COVID-19 is a young disease" about which little is known. In short, this is why open science and innovation are needed: to reduce the costs of creating a vaccine by following highly diversified conceptual and technological strategies.  The large multinational drug companies know this, and their laboratories make use of dozens of partners to identify and produce the desired molecule. An example of international cooperation in this respect was founded in Oslo in January 2017. It is called CEPI (Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness and Innovation), started with the aim of promoting the development and storage of vaccines against the risk of new epidemics, and has raised funds from Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Welcome Trust and the governments of various countries.

But it takes more. At least on this epochal issue, is it possible that a continent of half a billion people like the European Union, with 19% of the population over 65 years of age, cannot gather the consensus necessary to coordinate and integrate existing initiatives with a program for frontier research and the health care we need? Is it possible that we do not see that such a program would produce the double benefit of preserving the health of Europeans and of giving credible support to the competitiveness of companies and research institutes on the continent? EU companies could take a leading role in supply chains such as that of life sciences, historically dominated by giant American, British, Swiss and Asian multinationals. Because this is what coronabonds can be used for: not to share a liability but to save millions of lives and strengthen the competitiveness of European industry.

In Italiano è stato pubblicato sul Corriere della Sera dell’9 aprile 2020