Who Does Pharma Choose to Be?
Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership
Marjorie Taylor Greene, the U.S. representative for Georgia's 14th congressional district, shared Moderna's post about the approval on Saturday for mNEXSPIKE, its next-generation COVID-19 vaccine, on X with the caption: "Not MAHA at all!!! Unreal."
The co-owner of a general contracting firm and CrossFit franchise before she was elected to the House, Greene rose to prominence as a conservative media figure during the first Trump administration when she published a series of articles for a website called American Truth Seekers. At the now-shuttered website, she "wrote favorably of the QAnon conspiracy theory, suggested that Hillary Clinton murdered her political enemies and ruminated on whether mass shootings were orchestrated to dismantle the Second Amendment," said NBC News.
Greene has also compared masks and vaccine mandates to the Holocaust:
On May 20, 2021, during an interview with David Brody of the far-right news network Real America Voice, Greene complained about the requirement to wear masks during House proceedings. Forcing Jews to wear gold stars and sending them by rail to concentration camps "is exactly the type of abuse that Nancy Pelosi is talking about," said Greene. She later apologized, saying "there are words that I have said, remarks that I have made, that I know are offensive, and for that, I want to apologize." She continued to use analogies to compare vaccine mandates to the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany. "People have a choice, they don't need your medical brown shirts showing up at their door ordering vaccinations," said Greene in a July 6, 2021, post on X.
Greene’s post about Moderna’s small technical win comes after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that the CDC is no longer encouraging COVID-19 vaccines for pregnant women and healthy children, marking a structural shift in federal public health guidance, which is to say another body blow to the collapsing “vaccine market” in the United States as a whole. Kennedy Jr. said about the new CDC guidance: "I couldn't be more pleased to announce that as of today the COVID vaccine for healthy children and healthy pregnant women has been removed from the CDC recommended immunization schedule."
It also comes after the federal government said it is canceling Moderna’s $766 million contract to develop a vaccine to protect people against flu viruses that could cause pandemics, including the bird flu virus that's been spreading among dairy cows in the U.S., citing concerns about the safety of the mRNA technology being used. For those of you who may recall, mRNA, a Nobel-winning technology, was harnessed by Trump officials to create Covid shots in record time — mRNA is the ‘narrative layer’ to Moderna’s storyline of value, as it was for Pfizer. And it is becoming a political reject as the nation’s leaders openly embrace vaccine skepticism.
Write Lizzy Lawrence and Isabella Cueto yesterday in STAT (mRNA, once lauded as a scientific marvel, is now a government target):
Republican lawmakers and federal health officials alike are shunning messenger RNA, a basic building block of biology that proved its value during Covid, and that holds promise for combating the next pandemic and unlocking new cancer treatments. Public health experts and biotech companies are watching in horror as the government cuts its investments in the technology, and as officials like health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. foment deep distrust of mRNA vaccines.
A survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that more than one-quarter of Americans say they probably or definitely would not take a coronavirus vaccine. Republican, rural and Black Americans are among the most hesitant to be vaccinated. Meanwhile in the United Kingdom, The Daily Mail is reporting that a record number of NHS staff — i.e., doctors and nurses — are rejecting the flu vaccine in “shocking” levels. Uptake has fallen from nearly 80 percent to 37% in four years. Said one advocacy group for the elderly:
“The shockingly low rates of uptake show a certain arrogance - a total disregard for patient safety - and puts vulnerable people at increased risk of death. Most NHS staff who catch flu will probably be OK but the people they are caring for may not survive if they pass it to them. It’s personal negligence.”
There are, I suspect, a couple of things going on here. One is temperamental. What’s euphemistically called ‘vaccine hesitancy’ is in one respect an epiphenomenon of our age of steroidal individualism. Professor Heidi Larson of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine speculates that it has a component of refusing to be bossed about. Her studies, she says, show that having the Covid vaccine made all-but-compulsory resulted not in gratitude but resentment: “Some people, maybe subconsciously, are angry about having been pushed into taking them. They feel enough is enough towards vaccines.”
Many people feel that way.
Which is why Moderna is crumbling, as the ‘system of markets’ currently locked in orbit around the word “vaccine” evaporates (retail pharmacies, including Rite Aid, are part of that system, as immunizations are/were once seen as one the biggest growth area for pharmacies). And no, all the CVS pizza parties that money can buy will do little to boost vaccination rates. Bloomberg’s Ike Swetliz last month (CVS Offers Bonuses and Pizza Parties as Perks to Boost Vaccine Sales):
CVS Health Corp. is pushing hard to make sure people get their shots.
The pharmacy chain is giving bonuses to some staff whose storesexceed vaccination goals. And earlier this month in Rhode Island, CVS offered some pharmacies an extra incentive — raffling off a pizza party, taco lunch, donuts and ice cream for staff, according to an email reviewed by Bloomberg News. Another prize is a day off at the beach for the pharmacy manager.
The company is also phoning and texting customers encouraging them to get shots, and working with social media influencers to remind people how easy it is to get vaccinations – for Covid, flu or just about anything else.
There are bigger issues at play.
The Wild Borderlands Between Fact and Fiction
The Problem everyone seems to be struggling with is finding and communicating strategic fit to the rapid and intentional disassembly of the old order, to a world transitioning from Newtonian economics to a world of quantum economics, where two things that seem to be in opposition can be true at the same time.
There are all sorts of personal decisions we restrict for the collective good. It’s why, for instance, you don’t get to decide which side of the road you drive on or whether you stop at traffic lights. The people who take a principled decision to refuse vaccination rely for their continued health and the health of their children on a majority of the supposedly unprincipled taking the jab. Once the refusers reach a critical mass, we’re in trouble.
There again, the basic presumption against having paramilitary paramedics kicking in the doors of crackpots and vaccinating them by force is sound. We are, rightly, squeamish about the sort of intervention that takes the form of a demand rather than a prohibition. A vaccine is, like it or not, an invasive procedure. So far, as far as I understand it, the hope has been that so long as the crackpots are outnumbered we can just about let them be.
At this stage it’s hard to predict how long they are going to be outnumbered.
That temperamental resistance flows into a wider current in the culture. Covid made vaccines a giant part of the daily news cycle and associated them with exactly the sort of state authority that the disinformation cesspools of social media, in which Greene swims, love to rail against.
There's a reason Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla received loud boos when he was introduced by Donald Trump at the White House in February: The foundational pieces for everyone have disappeared. That status quo has collapsed. The base layer is gone. And that collapse is not a future state. It’s a current state.
We are in the midst of a massive transformation coming at us with a speed and level of intensity that no one has faced before. Society has changed. The underlying economics have changed. The information environment has changed. It’s not like just returning to the old status quo is the answer. We’re at the center of the tornado right now, and it seems like it’s whipping all around us. And I don’t think anybody really understands how to make it stop.
“This world does not need more entrepreneurs,” explains Margaret J. Wheatley in ‘Who Do We Choose to Be?’, her book on how to engage sanely with the destructive dynamics of our time. “This world does not need more technology breakthroughs. The world needs leaders because leadership has been debased as those who take things to scale or are first to market or dominate the competition or develop killer apps. Or hold onto power by constantly tightening their stranglehold of [control] until people are left lifeless and cowering.”
Who Are You?
Punk Rock existed on the assumption that everything before it was useless. Just as rock ‘n’ roll obliterated the pop music that appeared before it, and the British Invasion made the music of Fabian and Bobby Vinton obsolete, punk rock spat on the vacuous, bloated arena rock of Yes and Pink Floyd. Bands like The Clash and Sex Pistols did not hold back when speaking out against their predecessors.
Pete Townshend pushed back at the notion that rock was dead after a chance meeting with two Sex Pistols in a pub, which led to the inspiration “Who Are You?” the title track on the Who's last album released by the group before Keith Moon's death in September 1978.
The very function of identity — to respond and change in order to survive — has been inverted. It is hard to identity with this upside-down world. No wonder we can’t understand it (for more Blue Spoon thinking on this, see The Delicate Art of 'Strategic Fit')
A question for the strategically pivoting everywhere, particularly the “Fueled by Scientific Discovery” pharmaceutical industry, is this: who do you choose to be, right now, at this moment in history, when the foundation supporting who you are is being strip-mined away? Will you claim leadership? Will you help restore sanity?
The weight is out there, waiting to be picked up and given better direction.
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/ jgs
John G. Singer is Executive Director of Blue Spoon, the global leader in positioning strategy at a system level. Blue Spoon specializes in constructing new industry ecosystems.