Rep. Peters Promotes Pharma Agenda As the World Calls for #Vaccines4All
San Diego Democratic Congressman Scott Peters is among those who have taken the lead in soliciting support for a letter calling on President Joe Biden to continue denying developing countries’ request for a temporary waiver from intellectual property rules that severely limit their ability to mass produce COVID-19 vaccines developed in the United States and Europe.
His role in circulating this letter shouldn’t be surprising to anybody who’s followed the 52nd District Representative’s actions on Capitol Hill. Though he may vote for certain socially conscious initiatives, when it comes to the supply chain for the healthcare industry, he’s no hero.
It’s always about “jobs” when it comes to selling corporate schemes, except that it rarely is. “Jobs” is a code word for company share price and executive bonuses.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, along with nine other liberal senators have pushed back, calling on the President to back a temporary waiver. Congress member Jan Schakowsky is leading the charge on the House side, gathering more than 60 signatures on a similar letter to the administration.
The ugliest truths about healthcare concern the pharmaceutical industry. Drug makers spend millions upon millions of dollars to keep the mythology alive about their drive to save and improve lives. This essay isn’t about quibbling about the necessity for pharmaceutical innovation, nor do I take issue with the efficacy of vaccines. (Get your COVID shot. Don’t delay!)
Rather than grant a temporary waiver allowing mostly Third World countries to rapidly increase the production of COVID-19 vaccines, drug makers and their allies are opposing such an action based on bogus arguments about industrial capability, safety, and intellectual property.
In order to stop the ongoing pandemic from the damage it’s doing to economies, institutions, and societies it’s going to be necessary to vaccinate most of the people on the planet. The longer we wait, the more chances there are of a viral mutation negating all the previous precautionary measures made to date.
https://twitter.com/WorldBank/status/1380552256781697029?s=20
Viruses naturally mutate. It’s how they survive. By reducing their incidence in the population the odds of a more dangerous variant decline. It’s simple science.
So you would think that industrialized nations --most of whom are seeing some benefit from mass vaccinations-- would have policies expediting widespread inoculation efforts in less developed countries. But you’d be wrong.
Governments took big risks by funding research (and production capacity) that made rapid development of vaccines possible. Pfizer and Biontech developed their vaccine with the help of funding from the German government. And both Moderna and Johnson & Johnson received billions of dollars in research and development aid from the U.S. government.
From the Washington Post:
These exclusive franchises are on track to generate billions of dollars in revenue for the companies. The Moderna vaccine, which was co-developed with the United States government and supported with $483 million in taxpayer backing, is expected to bring in $18.5 billion for the company this year, Moderna said in February.
Pfizer, which partnered with Germany’s BioNTech, a company that received German subsidies, has predicted it will get $15 billion from sales of its vaccine, an estimate that is considered conservative. Pfizer did not accept U.S. government funding.
The United States and a handful of other wealthy nations are blocking a proposal allowing for a more rapid scale up vaccine production at the World Trade Organization.
From the Huffington Post:
But without the freedom to scale production in accordance with domestic need and build on vaccine research conducted in wealthier nations, countries like India and South Africa ― the lead proponents of the waiver ― say that they will be unable to scale up production to meet demand.
More than 175 former heads of state and Nobel laureates, including former United Kingdom Prime Minister Gordon Brown and women’s rights advocate Malala Yousafzai, expressed their support for these countries’ demands in an open letter to Biden on April 14.
“A WTO waiver is a vital and necessary step to bringing an end to this pandemic,” the signatories said.
The letter from the prominent global figures references lessons learned from the HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1990s, when pharmaceutical prices prevented millions of people in developing countries from accessing life-saving medications.
Arguments against granting the waiver simply drip with racism and self-interest. They can be summed up as ‘the poor brown people don’t have the ability or the safety standards to produce vaccines.”
From the Intercept article (correctly) titled: Factory Owners Around the World Stand Ready to manufacture COVID-19 Vaccines.
The drug industry has strenuously argued that any legal proposal to allow the sharing of intellectual property and creation of generic coronavirus vaccines is pointless because there are no facilities around the world that can be tapped.
Thomas Cueni, the president of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations, said that sharing IP “wouldn’t give us the tools to produce more doses of vaccines.”
Bill Gates, the billionaire philanthropist whose foundations help manage the United States and Europe’s primary Covid-19 outreach efforts to the developing world, known as Covax, was even more blunt. “It’s not like there’s some idle vaccine factory, with regulatory approval, that makes magically safe vaccines,” Gates said last weekend by way of explaining to Sky News why he thought the recipe for making coronavirus vaccine should not be shared.
An attempt by the WTO at a compromise-- through a mRNA technology transfer hub-- by inviting manufacturers and owners of patent patented vaccine technology to provide know-how, process training, and intellectual property rights allowing low-and middle-income countries to produce their own vaccines garnered more than 50 expressions of interest. Unfortunately, none of the players in the industry responded.
Most if not all of the genetic drugs we consume in the US are manufactured abroad in the same countries that are apparently not advanced enough to be trusted to make COVID-19 vaccines.
This is a short version of a complicated tale about Big Pharma vs the world. Suffice it to say there are details and sidebars that I haven’t covered in the interest of readability. None of these change the basic premise that these companies see increasing corporate wealth as more important than people’s lives.
Congressman Scott Peters and Wisconsin’s Ron Kind, who is also pushing this letter, are among Congress’ top 25 recipients of contributions from pharmaceutical industry political action committees in the 2020 election cycle.
https://twitter.com/Piobair/status/1385377128082984965?s=20
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Lead image via Unicef