Vaccine Act 1986

A lot of time in MBA school is spent on defining and discussing corporate social responsibility (CSR), giving back to the community, local or global. The recent concerns about the Wuhan Coronavirus, now re-labeled Covid-19, like the concern about Zika, Ebola, and SARS has lead to frantic calls to Big Pharma to provide a vaccine. Sanofi Pasteur has now partnered with our US Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, BARDA, a part of Health and Human Services, to develop a vaccine. But that decision was also accompanied by other members of Big Pharma saying that they were not pursuing a vaccine. Do these large corporations have a broader social responsibility to create these vaccines?