The citizens of South Sudan, Mali, and Zimbabwe do not want our shoddy COVID-19 vaccines. Germany has been completely unable to give away their millions of soon-to-be-expired doses because nobody is interested.
If quickly developing truly effective coronavirus vaccines were currently possible, though, you would have a good argument.
I think that whether or not the vaccines developed by Western pharmaceutical companies are effective or safe is a different issue from whether or not vaccines - any vaccine for any illness, indeed any medicine whatsoever - should be privately owned, monopolized, and their recipes and manufacturing processes kept out of the public domain. If the Hippocratic Oath means anything at all, it means that the entire project of medicine should be one of open source, mutual benefit, and universal uplift. Privatized medicine, corporate profit maximization, and private health insurance are abominations and totally antithetical to health care. The fact that pharmaceutical companies use taxpayer dollars to develop their drugs, privately reap the benefits at our expense, and then viciously attack any entity, including sovereign nations, that try to develop generic medicines, is ugly and totally backwards.
I just wanted to push back against the idea that the poor, disadvantaged citizens of the Global South are yearning for our flawed COVID vaccine, and that only the greedy corporations and governments of the West are preventing them from having access to it.
The fact is that they don't want this product, they won't even take it for free.
Which brings up another aspect, one of trust. When medicines are developed and administered by a monopoly, the company is incentivized to hide problems with the treatment, including dangerous side-effects. Knowing this, many people are distrustful of big pharma medicines, often regardless of whether or not those medicines are efficacious, and I don't blame anyone for such mistrust. These companies have demonstrated time and again that they do not have people's health and safety as a primary concern, and the COVID vaccine development and rollout is just one example of many.
The citizens of South Sudan, Mali, and Zimbabwe do not want our shoddy COVID-19 vaccines. Germany has been completely unable to give away their millions of soon-to-be-expired doses because nobody is interested.
If quickly developing truly effective coronavirus vaccines were currently possible, though, you would have a good argument.
I think that whether or not the vaccines developed by Western pharmaceutical companies are effective or safe is a different issue from whether or not vaccines - any vaccine for any illness, indeed any medicine whatsoever - should be privately owned, monopolized, and their recipes and manufacturing processes kept out of the public domain. If the Hippocratic Oath means anything at all, it means that the entire project of medicine should be one of open source, mutual benefit, and universal uplift. Privatized medicine, corporate profit maximization, and private health insurance are abominations and totally antithetical to health care. The fact that pharmaceutical companies use taxpayer dollars to develop their drugs, privately reap the benefits at our expense, and then viciously attack any entity, including sovereign nations, that try to develop generic medicines, is ugly and totally backwards.
I agree completely.
I just wanted to push back against the idea that the poor, disadvantaged citizens of the Global South are yearning for our flawed COVID vaccine, and that only the greedy corporations and governments of the West are preventing them from having access to it.
The fact is that they don't want this product, they won't even take it for free.
Which brings up another aspect, one of trust. When medicines are developed and administered by a monopoly, the company is incentivized to hide problems with the treatment, including dangerous side-effects. Knowing this, many people are distrustful of big pharma medicines, often regardless of whether or not those medicines are efficacious, and I don't blame anyone for such mistrust. These companies have demonstrated time and again that they do not have people's health and safety as a primary concern, and the COVID vaccine development and rollout is just one example of many.