“... They literally have everything to gain and nothing to lose ...”
No, they would lose big.
It’s not just this particular vaccine. It’s the process to make many more vaccines for other diseases in a similar way. That’s their future that would be taken away.
Perhaps I said it wrong or incompletely. Big pharma has nothing to lose and everything to gain by keeping the patents that our tax dollars paid them to develope while getting immunity from the harm they might cause.
It’s good to have corporate welfare.