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Why pharma giant @Pfizer should NOT control the COVID vaccine
While the vaccine itself is welcome news, Pfizer has a long history of price gouging as well as scandals involving tax avoidance, environmental destruction. Production of a life saving medication as desperately-needed should not be entrusted to this corporate giant’s executives.
AIDS medication is one example of the company’s extreme greed. In the early 2000s Pfizer came under fire for their high price of AIDS drugs sold around the world. Under intense public scrutiny, the company was pressured into making some nominal donations, but this was shortlived.
Pfizer, like all mega corporations, goes to great lengths to avoid paying taxes. In 2005 Pfizer took advantage of a U.S. tax holiday for companies that agreed to repatriate their foreign profits. The policy was presented to the public as a job creating measure.
Pfizer took advantage of the tax holiday more than any other company, repatriating $37 billion to save $11 billion in potential taxes, but instead cut its workforce in the United States.
The company has been fined many times by the EPA. For example, its plant in Groton, Connecticut was fined in 2005 over a major chemical release that caused serious injuries, then again in 2008 over Clean Air Act violations. The fine amounted to nearly $1 million.
Their CEO Albert Bourla said earlier this week that he disagrees with the critics who argue that COVID-19 vaccine developers forgo profits in the interest of humanity writ large. He called his detractors “fanatics” and said “Who is finding the solution? The private sector.”
There is no reason for anyone to expect a company with such a sordid history to be responsible enough to handle the dissemination of perhaps the most important medical advancement of the century — the vaccine to the coronavirus.
Like all great scientific breakthroughs, this vaccine is the product of the collective work of many people, so it makes no sense for the rewards of such a product to go into the pockets of a handful of Pfizer executives.
The vaccine should, like the polio vaccine before it, be held in common and freely available to all who need it. That is the only way to effectively stomp out this virus and bring an end to this pandemic.
Read the full article: https://www.liberationnews.org/why-pharma-giant-pfizer-should-not-control-the-covid-vaccine/
Read the full article: https://www.liberationnews.org/why-pharma-giant-pfizer-should-not-control-the-covid-vaccine/
