Drug companies have historically pleased investors by promoting vaccine development programs during disease outbreaks, then quietly dropping them later, according to Dana Brown, director of The Next System Project, a research and development lab for political-economic alternatives. Despite an outbreak raging in the Republic of Congo, the British drug maker GlaxoSmithKline recently gave up its effort to develop a vaccine for Ebola and handed off its research to a nonprofit lab. Ebola is deadly but relatively rare globally, and the market was too small to generate significant profits. In 2017, the massive French drug maker Sanofi pulled out of a partnership with the U.S. Army to develop a vaccine for the mosquito-borne Zika virus.

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