Perpetual pandemics

When a hero of mine, journalist Edward R Murrow, asked another hero of mine, Nobel Prize-winning virologist Dr Jonas Salk, if he had patented his world historic polio vaccine, he said, “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?” And so, the deadly and long-dreaded disease polio was basically wiped from the face of the Earth in a few years. Because Salk put people before profits.

What was true in the 1950s, remains true today. If we want to defeat a global threat like the coronavirus pandemic, we need a strong global response focused on vaccinating as many of Earth’s multitudes as we can as fast as we can. That militates toward banning pharmaceutical corporations from being allowed to patent their vaccine research – which is largely based on publicly-funded basic science research. Public investment thus becomes private profit … with few if any strings attached.

In a better world, when a pharma like Moderna ‘partnered’ with Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to develop its coronavirus vaccine last year, it should have been forced to release the final product out of patent in exchange for access to government-sponsored research data and a sweetheart vaccine production deal with the US government (resulting in a cool two-and-a-half billion of federal cash courtesy of the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed, according to Politifact). As it stands, Fauci and the Biden administration are now fighting Moderna’s July US patent application for its Covid vaccine and demanding that the company share the patent with the National Institutes of Health – the parent agency of the NIAID – according to CBS.

But that still allows a private company to hold a patent on a desperately needed vaccine. And points away from the road we should have travelled. Moderna and all pharmas worldwide should have been enjoined to work together to develop a suite of vaccines that wealthy nations could have paid to produce in sufficient quantities to immediately distribute to the entire global population at speed.

Had we gone the public vaccine production route and made sure vaccines were available everywhere early on, then we would have likely already stopped the coronavirus pandemic in its tracks – even allowing for vaccine ‘hesitancy’ by 20-30 percent of the world’s population.

Instead, according to Our World in Data, as of this writing just “54.1 percent of the world population has received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine.” While “[o]nly 5.7 percent of people in low-income countries have received at least one dose.”

Given that most major coronavirus vaccines require two doses to be fully effective, it should be obvious that the majority of people are yet not properly protected from the dominant Delta strain of the coronavirus. And as waves of Covid infection continue to buffet humanity, the virus is going to continue mutating into new variants for years to come before we finally beat the pandemic.

Excerpted: ‘Big Pharma and Omicron’

Courtesy: Counterpunch.org