End of the year COVID thread (take 2):

Ok, you got the message about the failure of public health. Now let's talk about COVID in the coming year and the big story that is gonna kill enormous amounts of people, and which the press is still not reporting on.

Finally we have

some vaccines that work. This is extraordinarily good news. The trouble, though, is that everyone in the world needs the vaccines, and fast. In the last year COVID has globally caused well over a million deaths. The disease is projected to have cost the global economy over

$7,000,000,000,000 just this year. That's a very big looking number. It is seven trillion dollars. And this is just a projection of the decline in gross world product. If you compare this year's production to what was expected, this figure is quite a lot higher. But at seven

trillion, that's about 5% of all production in the world. There are very few people who haven't had their lives and livelihoods massively disrupted by the virus.

So what's the scandal? Everyone seems to think that the vaccines are being produced and rolled out as quickly as

possible. Unfortunately that's not true. There remains very large production capacity in the world to make both the Moderna and the Pfizer vaccines, which is not being used. Why is this the case? The short answer is because of intellectual property and patent law. The world could

have started producing these vaccines in every country and rolling them out to every population, but they are not allowed because of proprietary technologies and formulas. The result is that only Moderna and Pfizer themselves are allowed to produce the vaccines, and they can only

do it in limited quantities. What is worse, is that Pfizer and Moderna then sold all of the first year's worth of doses to the richest countries in the world. For most of the world's poorest countries - where vaccines are needed because there is no availability of lots of other

more expensive types of treatment, and no access to ventilators/CPAPs for people who get sick, there is an expectation that vaccine won't start to be delivered until 2022. Just think about that. Think about the year you have just had, and consider that the poorest countries in

the world are going to have to put up with another year of that, not because the vaccine can't be made, but because of a patent, and because Moderna and Pfizer will not release their recipes and allow generic versions of their drugs to be manufactured. Isn't the world screaming

about this? Well yes. It wasn't really covered in the news but South Africa and India took a proposal to the WTO to ban the patents so they could make generic versions of the vaccines. It was blocked by the USA, the UK, and the EU. There's a really good report on the process

here, which you should all read: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)32581-2/fulltext - it's fucking miserable.

Ok, but also it's worth saying that this entire scheme is wildly irrational. Think about it: a virus that costs the world seven trillion dollars, and which has already killed a million people,

and nobody does shit about the huge global delay in vaccination, which will certainly kill a million more, and will cause even greater economic damage, just because nobody dares take on the pharmaceuticals industry. This effectively makes Moderna and Pfizer the biggest companies

in the world: not because they are involved in the sort of economic activity that allows people to sustain their lives, but because with their patents they are able to do the most enormous global economic damage.

I'm not going to hide the fact that I'm not capitalism's biggest

fan, but even from the perspective of capital, just think about it: a patent owned by a company with a market capitalisation of just under $50bn is allowed to cause tens of trillions of dollars of economic hurt. Now that is some deep irrationality. Even in the most extreme

scenario, the global pharmaceuticals industry only turns over about $1.5tn each year: the cost of not binning these patents for just this year alone is five times that. But from the simple standpoint of profit, a company like Moderna is going to make a few bucks per shot on its

vaccine. If everyone in the world needs a couple of shots that means the profit from this vaccine maxes out at about $50bn. But the patent on it will have cost the world literally a hundred times that. And this is without considering the enormous amount of death, sickness,

destroyed livelihoods, mental health crises, the nations in which health infrastructure is overwhelmed. When I spoke in my last thread about people having a bad time not being concerned by those who are worse off, this is precisely what I meant - but on a global scale. We know

that the poorest parts of the world already suffer from huge amounts of infectious diseases, for which we have treatments. Covid is on the verge of becoming another one of those: simply endemic and deadly in all those areas where vaccines are not available for economic reasons.

I wish more people were talking about this. This really will be the story of 2021, and it is something that can be fixed really easily: by the world making a decision that everyone who can should be able to make a medicine that everyone needs. If that isn't a reason to rise up

and change things, then I don't know what is.