Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic has revitalised the debate on the social shaping of biopharmaceutical research, highlighting the extent to which science «in action» is affected by institutional contexts. This article reconstructs the innovation processes that led to the development of four protein vaccines against Covid-19 produced in Cuba and US. The main thesis is that crucially influencing the biochemical composition, and consequently the accessibility of the vaccines, would have been socioeconomic factors such as the type of ownership of the companies, the value held by intangibles in their business models, and the availability of infrastructure for industrial scale-up. In particular, the use of proprietary biotechnology by only one of the vaccines, Nuvaxovid, would reveal the characteristics of the US industry’s ways of innovating, which shapes the content and direction of technoscientific production based on the value generation strategies prevailing in its target market, with controversial consequences for public health