When the US government awarded over $10 billion in contracts and advance purchase commitments to drug companies working on COVID-19 vaccines and treatments, it did not require the recipients of government money to agree to offer their products at fair prices or share intellectual property rights to enable faster production.
Now, two of the companies awarded those contracts — Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson — are trying to prevent shareholders from voting on resolutions to require the companies to disclose information about the impact of government funding on vaccine access.
The US government has purchased two hundred million doses of the Pfizer vaccine and one hundred million doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccines, for about $20 and $10 per dose, respectively.
The shareholder resolutions, filed by members of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR), a shareholder activism organization, ask those two companies to inform their shareholders how “receipt of public financial support for development and manufacture of products for COVID-19 is being, or will be, taken into account when making decisions that affect access to such products, such as setting prices.”
Similar resolutions were also filed at Eli Lilly, Gilead, Merck, and Regeneron.
Both Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson filed “no action requests” with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in December, asking the agency to rule that the companies can withhold the proposals from shareholders. Neither company responded to the Daily Poster requests for comment.
“Did You Take Government Funding Into Account?”
In nearly identical filings prepared by the same lawyer, both Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson argued that the proposals attempt to “micromanage” the companies “by requesting an intricately detailed report.”
Meg Jones-Monteiro, ICCR’s health equity director, called the micromanaging claim “ludicrous.”
The claim that investors are trying to “micromanage” the companies comes from an SEC precedent finding that certain “ordinary business operations” should not be subject to shareholder oversight. But Jones-Monteiro argues that the issue of vaccine pricing during pandemics doesn’t fall into this category.