Victory in the so-called race for a coronavirus vaccine rests on the skills of a handful of private companies whose primary motivation is hardly the public good. Can the Big Pharma deliver what we need to recover from this pandemic and prevent others from occurring? On Episode 9 of The Politics of Everything, hosts Laura Marsh and Alex Pareene interview Alexander Zaitchik, a regular contributor to The New Republic, about patent monopolies, the history of vaccine development in the United States, and the promise of alternative models of drug production.

Later in the episode, Alex and Laura talk with the book and film critic Lidija Haas about Rodham, Curtis Sittenfeld’s counterfactual novelization of the life of Hillary Clinton.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices