Getting vaccinated is in the interests of all working people worldwide
https://themilitant.com/2021/06/19/getting-vaccinated-is-in-the-interests-of-all-working-people-worldwide/
BY JOHN STUDER
Vol. 85/No. 25
June 28, 2021
“The union movement needs to organize to assure that all workers get
vaccinated, the only road to stop COVID-19 once and for all,” Róger
Calero, Socialist Workers Party candidate for mayor of New York, told
the Militant June 14. “They should run union-organized vaccination
programs in every city and explain why it’s in the interest of the
working class to carry this out. As I campaign, I urge everyone to get
vaccinated.
“The starting point of the bosses and their government is to maximize
the profits of the pharmaceutical, hospital and insurance companies,”
Calero said. “They view the vaccines as private property, not a
scientific conquest that should be placed at the service of humanity as
a whole. This means people in the weaker capitalist countries, and
especially in semicolonial Africa, Latin America and Asia, won’t see
substantial vaccination for years, if ever. It’s an anti-working-class
outrage and proves once again that the capitalist ruling families are
morally unqualified to rule.”
Pfizer reported in May that they expect to rake in at least $26 billion
off their vaccine this year. Pfizer bosses predict the profit margin on
the drug’s sales would be in the high 20% range. Company chairman and
CEO Albert Bourla boasted he was “extremely proud” of the way the
company has begun 2021.
Pfizer already holds the exclusive patent on the highest-selling drug
ever — the cholesterol-lowering drug Lipitor — which has generated some
$125 billion since it was first marketed. Pfizer fought for years to
prevent generic, and less expensive, versions of the drug from being
produced. When Watson Pharmaceuticals’ generic version was finally
released, Pfizer got a cut of its profits on every pill.
Pfizer, Moderna and the other capitalist pharmaceutical companies have
patented their vaccines, preventing manufacture and distribution of them
worldwide. While this helps assure monopoly profits, it sentences
millions to disease and death.
In the development of vaccines for past pandemic scourges, some medical
researchers have refused to patent their discoveries, making them
available for all. Jonas Salk developed the first vaccine for polio.
When he was asked who owned the patent, he replied, “Well, the people, I
would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”
The U.S. government helps bosses reap maximum profits, even if it puts
people at risk. The vaccine rollout by Johnson & Johnson has been marked
by neglect for care and safety in production, forcing the company to
destroy millions of doses. At the beginning of June when millions of
doses were set to expire and would have to be destroyed, the U.S.
government stepped in with a helping hand, and simply extended the
vaccines’ expiration date by six weeks.
“Our unions need to fight for workers control of production. This is the
only way we can gain the power to prevent the bosses’ disregard for our
safety and to expose their business secrets and take charge ourselves of
how things are made,” Calero said. “Nothing could be more important in
today’s pandemic.”
Imperialist powers seize vaccines
Pfizer’s Bourla claims they’re doing everything possible to make their
vaccine available worldwide. “We share the mission of COVAX and are
proud to work together so that developing countries have the same access
as the rest of the world,” he said in January.
But this flies in the face of what they’ve actually done. They’ve put
the bulk of their efforts into driving highly profitable sales
agreements with the rulers in the U.S., U.K., other imperialist
governments and with EU officials. Their claim of world humanitarianism
is “one of the great public relations triumphs of recent corporate
history,” Richard Kozul-Wright, a director of the United Nations
Conference on Trade and Development, told the New York Times.
COVAX is a project of the World Health Organization, backed by the Bill
and Melinda Gates Foundation and funds from a number of imperialist
governments. It promises to get vaccines out to 190 countries, including
92 it says are “lower income.” However, they have had difficulty finding
enough available doses to make a serious dent. Most approved vaccines
have already been bought up, including big hunks of future production.
By March, the rulers in Washington, for instance, had bought up doses
for 750 million people — three times the country’s adult population.
COVAX says it hopes to distribute 1.3 billion doses to the 92 developing
countries by the end of 2021, but this will leave the vast majority of
people unprotected.
Washington has made it a condition that in donating vaccines to COVAX,
the U.S. rulers must have final say over what countries could receive
them, concerned more about its political and economic sway than
arresting the pandemic.
By mid-February, 75% of all vaccinations had been administered in just
10 countries, a substantial proportion in the U.S., while 2.5 billion
people in 130 countries worldwide had not received a single dose.
Two different class approaches
“There are two different class approaches to the vaccination effort
today,” Calero said. “One is based on ensuring the profits of the ruling
capitalist families in the imperialist countries. The other is advanced
by the Cuban people and their socialist revolution, which concentrates
the country’s social resources to develop and administer vaccines to
every single person in the country and to the peoples of any country who
ask.
“Despite the U.S. rulers’ punishing economic war against the Cuban
people, they’ve developed their own vaccine,” he said. “As of June 13,
over 2 million Cubans have gotten at least their first shot.
“Cuba’s medical and scientific accomplishments are only possible because
working people there made a revolution, taking power out of the hands of
the capitalist rulers and their imperialist backers in Washington,”
Calero said. “They provide an example of the road forward for working
people everywhere.”
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Irvin D. Yalom “Truth," Nietzsche continued, "is arrived at through
disbelief and skepticism, not through a childlike wishing something were
so! Your patient's wish to be in God's hands is not truth. It is simply
a child's wish—and nothing more! It is a wish not to die, a wish for the
eveastingly bloated nipple we have labeled 'God'! Evolutionary theory
scientifically demonstrates God's redundancy—though Darwin himself had
not the courage to follow his evidence to its true conclusion. Surely,
you must realize that we created God, and that all of us together now
have killed him.” ― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept