ANN ARBOR – Fred Brown, our epidemiologist, discusses the two COVID-19 vaccine candidates that have been introduced in the past week. The Moderna Therapeutics candidate may be able to get into mass production faster than the candidate developed by Pfizer, he said.
Trained as a medicinal biochemist, Fred has been on the discovery, development and/or launch teams of 27 major pharmaceutical, 13 diagnostic and 6 vaccine products. Collectively, these products save the lives of over 5.6 million people annually and generated over $35B of revenue in 2020.
Fred comes to the fight against the COVID-19 virus from a forty year career developing pharmaceutical solutions to fight infectious diseases and solving the myriad challenges involved in suppressing epidemics including HIV, H5N1, Ebola, Zika, measles and malaria. His extensive experience managing past pandemics are accelerating and supporting personal, business and government responses to COVID-19 around the world.
Fred has an unmatched ability to integrate his experience and education with analyses of data from medical, scientific, and economic sources, and help leaders interpret the data to develop effective action plans.
Fred has been assisting 17 U.S. state governments, 5 national governments, several agencies, 2 NGO’s and selected mayors with their COVID response at no charge during this outbreak.
Unlike many people with academic, medical and pharmaceutical credentials, Fred is fortunate to be self-employed, and can speak his mind without regard to constraints imposed by an employer or affiliated institution. His motivation in engaging full-time with this pandemic crisis is a deep understanding, experience set and personal desire to help solve it; he has no commercial interests to advance.
I see myself as a truth-telling antigen, trying to stimulate the world’s immune system to respond more robustly to the threat. My goal is to help people think clearly about the huge issues raised by the COVID-19 pandemic. – Fred Brown
