I'm Felix Salmon and welcome to Axios Recap, where we dig into one big story.

Today is Tuesday, November the 16th, and we're focused on Big Pharma.

I'm recording this show with a slightly sore arm because I got my COVID booster shot yesterday.

Yay me.

I've now been injected with three doses of MRNA COVID vaccine.

This is awesome for me, but it's deeply unfair.

Roughly half the planet has received zero.

In Nigeria, less than 3% of the population has received a single dose of vaccine.

So for Nigerians, what they really want, and for what the rest of the unvaxed humans on the planet want,

is for global vaccine production to ramp up to the point at which everyone has easy access to the vaccine.

That doesn't look like it's going to happen anytime soon.

Pfizer and Madonna are the companies that own the patents on the MRNA vaccines.

They control where it goes.

And what they've been doing is making sure that it goes overwhelmingly to the rich countries

who can pay top dollar for it.

And most importantly, they're not allowing the poor countries to just make their own

versions of the vaccine and distribute that.

The result is the big pharma is making enough vaccine for me.

It's not making enough vaccine for the planet.

And that means that COVID is going to run rampant for basically as far as the eye can see.

That's terrible for the global economy.

It's terrible for the American economy.

...