The Pandemic That Capitalism Made
It Would Cost Less to Vaccinate the World Than Big Pharma Earns in Vaccine Profits. If That Doesn’t Make Sense…That’s Because It Doesn’t
umair haque

The more details that emerge, the more grotesque and obscene the picture gets. Strong language? By the end of this post, if you’re not crimson with anger…well, let’s just give that about five minutes or so. (There are two kinds of people who won’t be angry by the end of this post — idiots and pharmaceutical executives.)

Don’t take it from me. Take it from Tom Frieden, former Director of the CDC. “If you’re just focusing on maximising your profits and you’re a vaccine manufacturer … you are war profiteering.” Did you get that? The former Director of the CDC just said that Big Pharma is war profiteering. If you think I used strong language…

Why does he say that? Well, first note that he had to head to the UK, to say it on Dispatches, which is one of the nation’s finest and most hardest-hitting news programs. In other words, nobody in America would even run the story.

So why does Frieden say that Pharma’s “war profiteering”? Because “the Channel 4 investigation reveals analysis by one biological engineering expert claiming the Pfizer vaccine costs just 76p to manufacture for each shot. It is reportedly being sold for £22 a dose to the UK government.” Hence, “Pfizer expects to deliver 2.3bn vaccines this year with predicted revenues of $36 billion.” Enough profiteering for you?

Now, you might be one of those people — those annoying people — who say, glibly, “Everyone has a right to make a profit! LOL! Good for them!” Sorry, wrong.

This is only the beginning of the story.

So let’s continue.

Meanwhile, Vanity Fair reported that “A $2.5 Billion Plan to Thwart Omicron-Like Variants Is Stalled Inside the Biden Administration.” That $2.5 billion is part of a larger $10 billion that’s needed to vaccinate the world against Covid. “The plan estimated that the U.S. government would need to invest $2.5 billion, as part of a larger, global $10 billion effort to fully or partially vaccinate nearly 3 billion more people.” Let’s hear that again: “USAID, which has been on the front lines of managing the federal government’s vaccine donations, acknowledged that ‘to reach 70% vaccination coverage in all countries by September 2022, up to $10 billion from the global community is needed to support vaccine delivery and administration in low- to middle-income countries.’”

Now. Have you connected the dots yet?

It would cost $10 billion to vaccinate the world, according to the US government. Go ahead, double that. Let’s call it $20 billion — doesn’t matter.

How much is one pharmaceutical company going to earn in profit from vaccines this year? $36 billion.

Still haven’t connected the dots? OK. Prepare to have your breath taken away in horror, then. I’m going to put it three different ways, so it really hits you.

It would cost less to vaccinate the world than pharma companies are earning from one years’ vaccine profits.

Pharma companies are earning more than three times in profits off vaccines…in one year…than what it would actually cost to vaccinate the world.…once and for all.

It would take less than one-third of what pharma companies are earning from one years’ vaccine profits to vaccinate the entire world for good.

Surely you can see that something is very, very badly wrong with this picture. Do you understand how badly you’re being ripped off…openly…flagrantly?

Pharma companies should not be earning multiple times more in profits than what it would take to vaccinate the entire world. Otherwise, the whole thing — the idea of vaccination — is just a shell game.

These economics point to the single greatest failure in modern history. Yes, really. This is all “suboptimal,” to use econ-speak. It is a “deadweight loss” incurred by monopolists. It is a market failure. Presumably, the sensible thing to do here would be just go ahead and spend $10 billion to vaccinate the whole world, instead of incurring a cost of $36 billion plus every year from Pharma companies.

Economists would — and should — say that all this is breathtakingly “inefficient.” Instead of spending $10 billion to vaccinate the world, once and for all, we are spending multiple times that, every year, to do it via Pharma companies.

How much “inefficiency” are we talking about? Let’s compare those two bills. $10 billion, once and for all. Go ahead, triple it, make it $30 billion. Or $36 billion, every year, into perpetuity. It doesn’t take a genius to see which one is the sensible, optimal, most efficient option by a light year. But it’s not just about “efficiency,” is it?

Those economics are a sham. They are disgraceful, horrific, obscene. Words are not strong enough to express the contempt and shame you and I should feel for them. Because we are talking not about iPhones, but a global pandemic. That has claimed millions of lives, and is going to claim millions more. This is not a joke.

Friends, you have just witnessed the greatest theft of modern times. Strong language? Go ahead, think about it with me rationally. Using just the facts. No matter how much you “believe” in the idea of earning a fair profit…it can’t remotely be fair to earn three times plus what it would take vaccinate the whole world…for one years’ vaccines.

What does all that really do? It just impoverishes us. All of us. How? Well we have to pay the bill one way or another — new variants emerge, so we pay in the form of lockdowns and slowdowns. We pay more money for vaccines we have to take forever. Or we vaccinate the world.

$10 billion now, or $36 billion a year — and that’s just the cost of the vaccines, not even the lockdowns and slowdowns — forever.

It doesn’t take a genius, does it?

We are being ripped off. This is the single biggest rip off of modern history. Yes, really. Nothing remotely comes close.

So why are we forced into this position? Because capitalism.

Covid is now a capitalism problem. No, capitalism isn’t the local dry cleaner you own or run or the little bakery you like. That’s just commerce. Capitalism is the above — ruthless profit maximisation by transnational entities even if it means a pandemic spreads forever…so that the money just keeps on piling up.

I’ve said it before, so bear with me, because I need to say it again.

At the beginning of this pandemic, a choice was made. We had two options.

We could have set up something like a World Vaccination Initiative, under the auspices of the UN. It would have taken open-sourced vaccines, let them be manufactured anywhere in the world, with oversight, and hired armies of doctors and nurses to administer them. Every country would have had them, and the elderly and the at-risk would have gotten them first, no matter which country they were in.

That would have been what you might call a “global public goods” approach to Covid — done through a new public institution, which spanned the globe, for the express purpose of vaccinating as many people as possible, as fast as possible.

If we’d done that, we probably could have stopped Covid.

The other choice was this. Give vaccine patients — give them, over objections and pledges from researchers to make them public — to Pharma. The biggest pharma companies in the world. With no obligation to even share those profits back with the public. Big Pharma would then decide who would get vaccinated, and how, and when, and why.

Guess which approach was chosen? The second one. Capitalism.

We didn’t use a public goods approach to vaccinate the world against Covid. We chose — or at least our leaders, with a little persuasion from Bill Gates and lobbyists — chose capitalism, meaning giving vaccines patents for free to Big Pharma.

Now, if you’ve studied the least bit of economics, you could have seen what was coming next. Capitalism does not provide public goods — not well, not usually at all. Why not? Because the point of a public good is that everyone should have it. I am better off when you use the library, get an education, have healthcare…have a vaccine.

That is why, in sensible countries, we don’t ask capitalism to provide these things. It doesn’t. There is no profit motive. So capitalism just creates one. It makes these things which everyone should have artificially scarce, jacks up the price, and builds monopolies. That is what happened with healthcare in America — it’s why Americans pay million dollar medical bills. And it’s what happened with Covid vaccines, too.

We asked — or our leaders relied on — capitalism to solve a public goods problem. And the inevitable happened. Capitalism didn’t provide the world the public goods it was asked to — how could it? Instead, it created artificial scarcities, undersupplied it, and, just like Tom Frieden says, profiteered.

So now we’re in an absurd, ludicrous, asinine position. All of us. New variants are going to be with us every year until kingdom come, because nobody’s still vaccinating the world.

Meanwhile, pharma companies are earning multiple times every year…into perpetuity…what it would take to end the pandemic once and for all.

We could end Covid for $10 billion, go ahead and double it and call it $20 billion. But Pharma’s making $36 billion a year in profit — charging us more than $36 billion — every year and not even ending the pandemic. This is the worst, dumbest, most painfully inept and stupid of all worlds.

We are being fleeced, had, ripped off, stolen from. Yes, stolen from. Who funded those vaccines? You and I did. They were all — all of them — created at public institutions with public funds using public research. Yet the licenses were just given to pharma. No profit sharing back with the public even.

And so now we are in this absurd place. To end Covid, it would cost a fraction of what we are now being forced to pay to Big Pharma every year forever. That is real money and more that you and I will pay, again, in the form of lockdowns, slowdowns, vaccines, new variants, lost health, illness, lost loved ones.

This, my friends, is the biggest economic failure in modern history. It is unconscionable. The world, including you, is now paying to Big Pharma multiple times over what it would cost to end the pandemic…not even to end it.

I don’t know if any of that will get through to Americans. For too many of them, greed and selfishness have become things to be celebrated and treasured. But if you’re a sane person? You should be angry as hell about the biggest rip off in modern history.