A little over one year after the COVID-19 pandemic began, with almost 100 million cases and over 2 million deaths around the world, the situation could hardly be bleaker. No effective remedy or treatment has yet been discovered. So only a combination of intensified hygiene measures and free, comprehensive, and generalized vaccination on a global scale can prevent the continuation of this tragedy.
First of all, it is necessary to emphasize what the best scientists in the field have taught us: this is not a natural phenomenon. The pandemic is the product of the drastic narrowing of the frontiers between the natural world and civilization, which has brought humanity into contact with viruses to which it was not previously subjected. We should not forget that, if this situation continues and develops further, other pandemics may occur. Agribusiness, deforestation, and aggression against nature are a diabolical incubator of new pandemics.
One initial observation is that the pandemic is not democratic. It threatens all human beings, but in an unequal way, according to the type of country and the social class, gender and/or racial origin to which they belong. It has ravaged countries with gutted and privatized health systems. The unequal performances of various governments, especially those of denialists such as Trump and Bolsonaro, have magnified the extent of the suffering of the population.
The pandemic also exposed the total lack of coordination between nations. What governs this is marketplace competition, in which the richest countries have already taken over 50% of the vaccine production scheduled for 2021, even though they make up only 14% of the world’s population.
Vaccines: when and for how many people?
In just under one year, the first vaccines appeared, and with them a renewed hope of ending the torment of the pandemic. However, the progress in production and distribution of Sinovac, Pfizer, and AstraZeneca vaccines has raised some serious problems. The small scale of production and intense competition in the market that has led richer countries to hoard most of this year’s expected production are making that hope impossible.
Delving deeper, the central problem, just as in all past epidemics, is the fact that vaccine production is entrusted to private pharmaceutical companies, which receive huge levels of state funding and then make massive profits thanks to the patenting of knowledge and the procedures to produce them. Because of the lack of the prospect for any profits, none of these companies have undertaken Coronavirus vaccine research, a virus that has already caused two previous epidemics (SARS and MERS), and which could have paved the way for the production of a vaccine for COVID-19. This is common practice in the pharmaceutical industry, which only undertakes research for new drugs or produces new drug breakthroughs as long as profit is guaranteed.
This time, with the threat being global, governments have funded companies with billions of dollars to produce the vaccines. According to an article in the New York Times, the Moderna vaccine was partially developed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United States, and then the company received around US$2.5 billion from the US state to produce it and as a down payment for the doses to be purchased later. Pfizer received US$455 million from the German government to develop its vaccine and purchase commitments of US$6 billion from the United States and the European Union. AstraZeneca has benefited from public funding of more than US$2 billion, including research funding and purchase commitments from the US and the EU. Even this data is “protected” by commercial secrecy, so it is not known exactly how much the various countries have paid for the vaccines.
Moreover, this research, which involves indispensable knowledge for the lives of billions of human beings, is regulated by a strict patenting system that prevents its content from being known and used by other countries. This is the same dilemma that occurred in previous epidemics such as the AIDS epidemic, which caused tens of millions of deaths due to the prohibitive cost of new patented drugs to treat it.
Just last year, India and South Africa proposed that the WTO suspend so-called intellectual property rights – formulated in 1994 after intense lobbying by pharmaceutical companies, among others – to ensure the uninterrupted flow of medicines and medical equipment during the current pandemic. However, the proposal was rejected by countries of the European Union, Britain, and the United States, along with Bolsonaro-governed Brazil. The lack of basic supplies to produce more doses of the approved vaccines in Brazil illustrate the severity and extent of the problem. There can be no illusion, on the boards of imperialist businesses, our lives are the current bargaining chips. Each company and/or capitalist government is currently bargaining for vaccines and raw materials in exchange for new business in, or more control over, dependent and semi-colonial countries.
To show the absurdity of this situation, it is worth remembering what the inventor of the first polio vaccine, Jonas Salk, said when he was asked who had the patent on the vaccine: “Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?” The same should apply to COVID-19 vaccines. To prevent the death of millions, we must put an end to patents on life.
This article is an English translation of “Um mundo ameaçado pela pandemia: pela quebra das patentes das vacinas, já”, Esquerda Online (EOL), 24/01/2021.
Translation: Bobby Sparks
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