With the possibility of a Covid-19 vaccine on the horizon – albeit still a long way off – the big pharmaceutical companies are pushing their respective governments to make sure they can profit from the pandemic by charging high prices. For their part, governments of the capitalist north are going to be demanding that their populations get priority over the first vaccines that are produced.
As a result of these and other disagreements, the potential vaccine is becoming a political football. The World Health Organisation and its parent body the United Nations, have always been political footballs, but in the tense geopolitical drama that is the coronavirus pandemic, it is even more the case than before.
Suspension of drug patents
At this week’s meeting of the WHO, diplomats from the USA have been pushing to get the WHO to distance itself from the idea of a free vaccine. In 2001, in what became known as the Doha Declaration, the World Trade Organisation sanctioned the suspension of patents on drugs, including vaccines, in the case of a “public health emergency”. But now the USA, backed also by the UK, Japan and Switzerland – countries where powerful pharmaceutical companies are based – are pushing for that not to apply. It would mean that the poorer countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America would be fleeced to pay for vaccines, provided they could afford them at all.
A report from Oxfam last year noted that the four biggest US pharmaceutical giants, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Merck and Abbott Laboratories, coined in an estimated $7bn in tax savings from new provisions US tax law. This would have been enough to pay for health insurance cover for more than two-thirds of the children in the US who currently do not have coverage. Over the past few years, these companies put the greatest priority on investor pay-outs to investors both as dividend and in the form of share buybacks. Meanwhile, investments in research and development remained stagnant…that is until coronavirus came along.
Damaging behaviour of Big Pharma
In the UK, again according to Oxfam, the same four companies may be underpaying around £125m of tax each year.
These giant corporations, according to Oxfam, also spend massively on lobbying operations “to influence trade, tax and health policies in their favour and give their damaging behaviour greater apparent legitimacy. Tax dodging, high prices and political influencing by pharmaceutical companies exacerbate the yawning gap between rich and poor, between men and women, and between advanced economies and developing ones.”
Trump is threatening to pull out of the WHO, alleging ‘too close’ a relationship between WHO and China and insisting that China shoulders the ‘blame’ for the virus outbreak. But it is also clear that lobbying by the very powerful and wealthy pharmaceutical companies in Washington might have a lot to do with Trump’s apparent petulance over WHO.
Back of the queue for vaccines
The poorer countries have an understandable reluctance to pay through the nose and being last in the queue for any vaccines that are produced. According to Ellen ‘t Hoen, a patents specialist at the University of Amsterdam, “it took a decade for African countries to get affordable Aids medicines, during which time millions of people died”. (Financial Times, May 19) “What we have seen in the past”, she said “is that high-income countries rush to the front of the queue and leave the rest of the world to fend for themselves.”
To make matters worse for Trump, the UK and Big Pharma, Chinese president Xi Jinping has committed Chinese pharmaceutical companies to making any vaccines they produce freely available across the globe. Andy vaccine developed in China, Xi has said, “will be treated as a public good”.
This goes to the heart of what socialist ideas are all about. In the UK, as elsewhere, capitalist companies and their political representatives think it is OK for profits to be made on illness – and where profits cannot be made, then treatment becomes unaffordable and therefore unavailable. You can be sure that any vaccines made available in the UK will be distributed through the NHS but at enormous cost and at enormous profit to the big companies.
Labour must demand a publicly owned health system
The irony is that most basic research in medicine still goes on in public institutions like hospitals, government facilities and universities. Where the private sector sponsors its own research, it is heavily subsidised by government, either directly through grants or indirectly through tax-breaks and incentives. A socialist organisation of the health service would mean that research, development and ultimately mass production of vaccines and medicines would be done in publicly owned facilities and, as Xi says, for the “public good.” As we have argued in relation to many different examples, Labour must demand an end to the non-stop looting of the NHS by the private sector, the pharmaceutical industry being a prime example.
May 19, 2020
