Covid-19 vaccine — a hostage of market dogma
While the world has been in the grips of the coronavirus pandemic for over a year by now, a glimmer of hope has started appearing in recent months with the arrival and regulatory approval of several covid-19 vaccines. Several have now become available globally since the initial race toward immunization development. However, if the first months since their availability are any indication of the future, the global vaccination efforts will be a painstakingly slow process, with the majority of the global population projected to receive vaccines only in the coming years. As even western countries struggle to secure and distribute the necessary doses from Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca, the majority of the developing world (and coincidentally a majority of the planet’s inhabitants) can do nothing but wait for vaccines to become available to them as well, perhaps sometime in 2022 according to the current estimations. Nearly the entire continent of Africa, with its 1.3 billion people, is only estimated to achieve widespread vaccination from 2023 onwards. It is perhaps worth keeping in mind that when it comes to pandemics, no one is safe until everyone is safe.
Does it have to be that way? Is the world truly at the mercy of the production capacity of a handful pharmaceutical companies? And if so, should we really accept years-long vaccination programs each time a future pandemic inevitably strikes? The answer to all three questions is a resounding no. While the rapid vaccine development is a great scientific triumph enabled by global cooperation and massive publicly funded research efforts (all the currently approved vaccines, and many others, were developed in publicly funded research institutes or through public programmes such as US Operation Warp Speed, which alone spent at least $10 billion), the actual vaccine production and distribution is a complete global failure of western governments caught in the neoliberal ideology whose principles they do not dare question. The two main principles here being the belief in absolute efficiency of the markets, and the sanctity of private profits.
The first principle prevents any intervention of governments to ensure as fast as possible global vaccination, which could in principle be achieved in a matter of months. Instead, every country is left queuing at the doors of Pfizer, scrambling to acquire even fractions of the necessary vaccine doses while painfully deciding who in each country can receive a vaccine — and who must wait. The second neoliberal principle cannot be violated as profits of the shareholders (in this case a narrow selection of pharmaceutical companies with the right patents) have to be ensured even at the expense of the investors (governments who for years financed vaccine development through public institutions) or the stakeholders (incidentally, the world). This need not be this way. The question being asked should not be “What are the production capacities of Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca and how long will it take to receive the doses?” but “What is the global production capacity for vaccine production?” The answer to the latter question is… significant. Estimations from 2019 point to a figure of about 8.3 billion doses in the best case and half of that in a moderate scenario. The world possesses many pharmaceutical plants capable of vaccine production all over the globe, many of which have been steadily increasing their production capacity since 2006 as a part of the Global Action Plan for Influenza Vaccines led by the WHO — yet another public programe to ensure our survival. These now stand idle as they do not possess the intellectual property for the vaccines in question. That is, the intellectual property funded and developed in public institutions with massive public funding and handed over to a selection of pharmaceutical conglomerates. As the chief of BioNTech (the company behind the technology that is now marketed as the Pfizer vaccine) recently admitted, the company developed its covid-19 vaccine with the help of continued research funding from the EU.
It is clear that (western) governments could massively ramp up the global production of the coronavirus vaccine, making it available in abundance to virtually every country in need. However, this would require waving away the corresponding patents, making their production available to any pharmaceutical company in the world with the required technology. Millions, possibly tens of millions of doses could be produced this way — daily. But as described earlier, this would violate sacred neoliberal principles as it would intervene in the markets in a way that benefits stakeholder (interventions that benefit shareholders, such as emergency cash injections, massive government contracts or government insurance policies for corporations are never objectionable) as well as cut into private profits of companies that would not be able to hold monopolies over the vaccines at the expense of the public.
This is hardly a ludicrous idea and there seems to be no natural law that would prevent the utilization of global pharmaceutical capacity to effectively apply publicly funded (and to a large extent publicly developped) vaccine technology against covid-19. Instead, the only obstacle is the currently dominant political ideology that renders any government ineffective in its capacity to solve a crisis, as any allowed approach has to work within a framework of that ideology. So while the world waits to slowly receive the necessary doses of vaccines from a selection of no less than a handful of companies and governments plan to vaccinate their population sometime within the next two years, the virus continues to spread rapidly. This not only continues to devastate communities all over the world, but perhaps even more importantly presents ample opportunity for the virus to mutate, develop and acquire new capabilities. Every delayed day of vaccination increases the chances of its spreading and with that the odds that it mutates and becomes more deadly. Fortunately for now the current vaccines appear to still be mostly effective against the new strains of the virus. But we have no such guarantees for the future. As The New York Times reports, the AstraZeneca vaccine has already been shown to be signifiantly less effective against certain new variants of the virus. Every day we delay the global vaccination is a gamble we should not and do not have to take. The failure to reject blind faith in markets and apply the power of the government where such power need be applied could prove detrimental for the world and unnecessarily stretch the pandemic even further into the future. Such pathological behaviour could hardly be described as anything other than utter irrationality, but despite what we are told by free-market apostles, the irrationality yet again proves itself to be the cornerstone of the market.
