Owning the Sun

An authoritative insider's look at the business of saving lives and Big Pharma's controversial long-game to capitalize off of public science from the New Deal era through COVID.

How, exactly, are vaccines made? How are they found and how are they funded? How has the pharmaceutical industry-already an actor of questionable ethics and morals-evolved and prepared itself for COVID-19 and future pandemics? How is a capitalistic, monopoly medical science industry concerned only with profit and IP going to save our lives?

Short answer: it probably won't. So we need to come up with something better.

Vaccines, long the focus of conspiracy theories and heated debates, have taken on new relevance in the age of COVID-19 and newly ignited debates over a pharmaceutical patent model that places profits above patients. Offering a historical analysis of the vaccine industry, Owning the Sun serves as a much-needed wake-up call that a profit-driven private industry is rarely best equipped to find solutions to widespread, impossible-to-predict public health disasters while offering a blueprint for how we can move forward.