Nationalize the Fucking Vaccine
Nationalize the Fucking Vaccine
The real conspiracy is, as usual, capitalism
I think the most depressing thing about the entire pandemic – which is really saying something – has been the embodied realization of just how thoroughly the systems of government of nearly the entire Western world have been given over to staggeringly impotent mediocrity. Or, potentially even worse, slack-jawed indifference.
This shouldn’t really be a surprise, considering. People in my generation (I’m in my early 30s) have watched a parade of absolute fuckwit clowns troop through Parliaments and Assemblies all over the rich world for decades, as entitled as spoiled little children, grinning sheepishly as they are exposed over and over again as the fumbling brown-nosed lackeys of a tiny caste of zillionaires, and responding to any crisis or even slight adversity with a combination of listless interest-rate tweaking, unapologetic class warfare, and lying through their teeth. Our political system is basically one in which factions of technocrats compete over the right to win favours from multinational corporations. I think a process akin to natural selection, set in place by the parameters of that system, has selected for increasingly feckless politicians, who are increasingly unwilling to propose even the slightest deviation from our collective trajectory. They are also increasingly beholden to the arcane machinations of inter-party manoeuvring and increasingly open about their undying allegiance to the increasingly hideously rich.
People can smell this shit. The whole reason millions of people would vote for a vain, bloated fool like Trump is because he pretended to rail against this type of thing. Normal people live our lives watching these smarmy dullards on TV say and do absolutely anything other than a single thing that would help us materially. We resign ourselves to it, though, because that’s just what politics is, and we all know that you can’t actually believe what these guys say, and politicians are crooks, and you have to get on with things. But I think most people kind of believe that if there was a real emergency, like in World War Two, or like in a movie about an alien invasion or something, the government would step up. They would do dramatic things and the army would fly scientists around in helicopters and the Prime Minister would make announcements on TV that would make us all get goosebumps and look at each other solemnly. I don’t know. Something.
And instead, what we have seen throughout the last two miserable years has been just grinding, dismal inadequacy. While China was building entire new hospitals in a matter of weeks, in Canada we were discovering that we didn’t even have the industrial capacity to produce face-masks anymore. We were discovering that our governments’ idea of a pandemic response was to keep everyone going to work all day but telling us we can’t see anybody in the evenings. We were discovering that our healthcare systems have been so underfunded that they’ve been in constant danger of collapse for two years and no one has any idea what to do about it other than forcing nurses to work mandatory doubles until they quit or die. We were discovering that we somehow didn’t have the ability to produce enough PPE, then PCR tests, then vaccines, then rapid tests, and now antivirals to fulfill our needs. We were discovering that while normal people lost our jobs and grandparents, or watched desk jobs and university educations morph even further into dystopian hyper-alienation with the overnight rise of Zoom hegemony, gig corporations and tech giants were raking in idiotically huge sums of money.
And somehow, insanely, maddeningly, we were discovering that the richest, most powerful countries in the world are apparently completely dependent on a handful of giant multinational pharmaceutical corporations to produce lifesaving vaccines and medicines for us, and that somehow, defying all reason, in the midst of this historical emergency, our governments were ready to fork over our money to these private companies for their patented products. We were discovering that the governments of NATO countries, which collectively spend over a trillion US dollars every year on their military budgets, somehow aren’t able to just appropriate the vaccine patents, demand the technical information on production methods, and build factories to pump out the product.
I really want to take a moment to stress that a trillion dollars is a fucking astonishing amount of money. For reference, a million seconds is around 12 days, a trillion seconds is 32,000 years; a million dollars in hundred-dollar bills fits in a shopping bag, a trillion dollars fits in a football field, in piles taller than you. You can do absolutely anything with a trillion dollars. You could put a manned base on Mars for a trillion dollars, maybe even more than one. You could give North America full high-speed rail coverage. You could plant a forest bigger than all the forests already on Earth combined. You could build about five thousand brand new hospitals – that’s one for every city on Earth, with a bunch left over. You could sure as hell build a couple of giant state-of-the-art factories to pump out vaccines, and maybe with some of the leftover hundreds of billions of dollars you could use your gigantic militaries to tell Pfizer execs that they can suck it if they think they can hold the entire Western world hostage like they were super-villains.
As it happens, two years into the pandemic, the United States government now apparently supports temporarily waiving Covid vaccine patents, but that does nothing about the fact that we still need these corporations to supply everyone with the information on production techniques, and anyway Europe is still blocking the negotiations at the World Trade Organization that would actually allow these patents to be waived. I understand that there are complicated international agreements that govern these sorts of things. I also just don’t care. We all know how serious this is. Covid has killed five or six million people, paralyzed the world’s economies and put us all through years of severe disruptions to our social, professional and political lives. Elderly people have been living in terror of a disease that mostly targets them, and I can’t even imagine what it’s like to be a high school student right now. And now, variant after variant will keep popping up in the almost completely unvaccinated global South because our governments are and have been too beholden to a couple of pharma giants to do what is, both morally and medically, so self-evidently the right thing to do: give some scientists some medals, say thank you very much, socialize the production process, and start manufacturing these vaccines on a mass scale for global distribution.
Think we can’t do it? In Canada, we used to have public vaccine production facilities. Justin Trudeau’s daddy is the one who nationalized one of them, and the other was attached to McGill University. As part of the neoliberal drift that has been hollowing out our public sector since longer than I’ve been alive for, both of them were then sold off in the 80s and 90s to private corporations.1 There’s absolutely no reason facilities can’t be nationalized or publicly run. There’s no reason they can’t be built from scratch on expedited timelines. There’s no reason manufacturing can’t be commandeered by the government, especially in the midst of an emergency. In the Second World War Canada created 28 Crown corporations (state-owned enterprises), built a large number of factories from the ground up, and produced thousands of planes and hundreds of ships within a few years (in the process doubling its GDP).2 This was the result of transitioning partly to a planned economy in response to the urgent situation.
Now, the FDA is approving new antivirals called nirmatrelvir and molnupiravir, developed by Pfizer and Merck respectively. These drugs seem very effective at preventing complications and death in people who contract Covid. The corporations have signed licensing agreements allowing them to be produced ‘without royalties’ in a number of developing countries, which is something, but the agreement excludes a number of countries with huge outbreaks such as Russia and Brazil, and doesn’t stop these pharma companies from absolutely minting money in the West. Their gross profit is exploding. In 2020 Pfizer posted an increase in profit of less than 1%, whereas last quarter it was up over 70%.3 (Moderna’s gross profit grew exponentially over the pandemic – they posted an increase of an astonishing 2,605%.)4 The antivirals have the potential to effectively end the pandemic once and for all, turning it from a dreary, drawn-out game of Russian roulette to a normal transmissible infection with a vaccine and a clear course of treatment. So why aren’t we building plants to rush production?
The whole bleak mess that has been the past two years has just pounded home the feeling I’ve had for my whole life: we’re pretty much on our own. Our governments, especially in North America, are completely incapable of reacting in a nimble or adaptive way to anything. They will always do anything to maintain business as usual, even when business as usual is literally impossible to maintain. When our children were all doing class by Zoom every other day (and learning absolutely nothing because of course), because there wasn’t enough space in our schools to social distance, did we respond by building and commandeering new venues for classes to be held in and offering university students jobs teaching? Absolutely not – preposterous – unthinkable. When our supply chains were collapsing because it turns out everything we need is produced in foreign countries, did we set up factories and staff them with laid-off line cooks, offering them twice what they made to get yelled at by greasy owners in dangerous hot kitchens? Of course we didn’t. When we realized these pharma companies would be making billions in blood money while our healthcare systems collapsed, did we consider appropriating their profits? Pfft. When it became clear that the virus targeted elderly people far more dangerously than younger people, did we set up nationalized logistics systems to guarantee elderly people safe, free delivery of goods and necessities to their homes? No. We relied on the magic of the free market and let Uber and SkipTheDishes corner things. For that matter, when it became clear that the virus was disproportionately killing workers who worked in close quarters with others, had a lot of contacts per day, couldn’t take time off work when they were sick, and lived in crowded conditions, did we force companies to address these issues? Did we start a task-force to crack down on labour law violations? Did we free up funds to build cheap housing for people? Predictably, in classic liberal fashion, what we did instead was ignore the clear causal factors completely – a segment of the population is trapped in risky low-income work with no rights and shit housing, a problem we could easily solve if we felt like it – and just pretended that the Covid virus is racist against black and brown people.
We’re coasting, hoping that our decrepit political-economic system will keep sputtering along while we gut every system that keeps it going and steadfastly refuse to do anything that might make things better for working people. When you look at how we’ve handled this crisis, the chances of the liberal world order being able to tackle the climate crisis seem pretty much non-existent. What are they going to do, tell us to Zoom to work instead of drive to save gas? Maybe hand Elon Musk ten billion dollars to develop greener jumbo jets? It’s a joke. We need to transform our economies completely. We are running out of time. These clowns won’t save us and they will sabotage every attempt to improve things for working people or the biosphere because doing those things would interfere with the bottom lines of the capitalist class, who think of us all as insects and wouldn’t hesitate to burn the entire planet to the ground if it preserved their power and wealth for one more year.
Enough of this cretinous criminality. Let’s build socialism in North America in our lifetime.