COVID-19 Pharmacare Pay-the-Rich Programs

April 19, 2021. Rally in Washington, DC.

The Pfizer/BioNTech/Fosun global cartel has made billions of dollars in profit from the pharmacare programs of various governments during the COVID-19 pandemic. The cartel consisting of Pfizer from the U.S., BioNTech from Germany and Fosun International from China is reporting billions of dollars in actual and potential gross income from the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. The vaccine is a joint development, production and distribution venture of the three monopolies.[1]

Governments are using a form of pharmacare to administer the vaccine to their populations free of charge to individuals. For example, the Government of Canada has contracted the Pfizer cartel to deliver millions of doses of the vaccine at unspecified prices per dose generally believed to vary between $20 to $30.

The Pfizer/BioNTech/Fosun cartel hatched a plan called "Project Lightspeed" to produce a COVID-19 vaccine and distribute it on a global scale in mid-January 2020. This was just days after the SARS-Cov-2 genetic sequence was first made public and almost two months before the World Health Organization declared the virus outbreak a pandemic.

The Pfizer cartel's direct sales of the COVID-19 vaccine to governments through pay-the-rich pharmacare programs represent 98 per cent of the 2.5 billion doses that Pfizer/BioNTech will produce this year. The cartel has pledged to contribute only 40 million doses or two per cent of its production to Covax, a multilateral partnership aimed at supplying vaccines to poor countries. Clare Wenham, a health policy expert at the London School of Economics denounced this amount as "a drop in the ocean" of what is urgently needed.

Case of Pfizer/BioNTech/Fosun Global Cartel

The Pfizer section of the cartel said COVID-19 vaccine sales for itself during the first three months of 2021 realized $3.5 billion in gross income. Pfizer expects its gross income from the vaccine for this year alone to balloon to $26 billion. In addition, it reported several hundreds of millions of dollars in income from 2020, as governments began ordering the vaccine. Pfizer says the profit margin from COVID-19 vaccine sales should be around 20 per cent of its gross income.

Pfizer's declared expropriation of added-value (profit) from its total realized gross income from all its sales in 2020 was $9.6 billion on a gross income of $41.908 billion. This reveals how profitable global health care has become for the cartels, especially when coupled with a form of pay-the-rich pharmacare. In addition to this private profit for the global owners, the Pfizer CEO was given $21 million as a so-called salary for 2020.

The BioNTech section of the cartel has "locked in" $11.8 billion in sales of the vaccine to this point mostly to European government COVID-19 pharmacare programs. The European Union alone has initially agreed to buy 1.8 billion Pfizer doses from the cartel without disclosing the price. Fosun says it has orders for 100 million doses in China on the books. The Pfizer cartel projects to produce and sell billions of doses of the COVID-19 vaccine in 2021 alone and continue in the coming years with "booster shots," including a modified version that only requires normal refrigeration not super low freezing as with the current one.

Intellectual Property Rights Within Liberal Democratic System

The oligarchs in control of Big Pharma oppose making the thought material surrounding the development of the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine known to all so it can be reproduced throughout the world for the benefit of all humanity. They insist the thought material dealing with mRNA is their private property coming from the heads of their scientists and should be used to profit the owners of the cartel as they paid for the necessary research to develop the vaccine.

Within the situation and modern world, to think of advances in science as someone's private property and not the treasured public property of all humanity is not only backward indeed but untenable. Propagandists for imperialism declare that the right of property ownership is the foundation for life itself but it is proving to be the opposite -- their so-called liberal democratic system which makes sure narrow private interests prosper is the purveyor of death and destruction all over the world.

The Pfizer cartel opposes any weakening of its private ownership of the thought material that it declares its scientists have developed as this would negatively affect its aim of making maximum profit. Writing in the New York Times, Rebecca Robbins and Peter S. Goodman point out the hypocrisy of this view. Pfizer's cartel partner BioNTech, they write, has "received substantial support from the German government in developing their joint vaccine. And taxpayer-funded research aided both companies -- the (U.S.) National Institutes of Health (NIH) patented technology helped make so-called messenger RNA vaccines possible. BioNTech has a licensing agreement with the NIH, and Pfizer is piggybacking on that license."[2]

The concept that in 2021 an individual or group can come up with an idea, innovation or invention that does not require the accumulated thought material of the ages and the collective participation of the people and resources of society is irrational. In today's world, scientific developments are social in the same manner the economy and life generally are social. Private ownership of ideas or thought material is in contradiction with the reality of modern social life. No recent invention or development in medicine, IT, digitalization, robotics or Artificial Intelligence would have been possible a century ago let alone during the previous peasant era of petty production. Scientific developments today are the result of mass public education and the accumulated thought material of the ages, especially since science began to take a solid and consistent public theoretical form in the late eighteenth century and left behind forever its previous dominant empirical character.

Lost in all the hoopla surrounding vaccines as the silver bullet to defeat the COVID-19 pandemic is a discussion of the possibilities to overwhelm or isolate the virus not only with pharmaceutical intervention but by taking action against its spread in particular to the most vulnerable throughout the world. 

The condition for the global spread of the virus is the imperialist system of states and their neo-liberal globalization and the past thirty years of the ruling oligarchs' anti-social neo-liberal destruction of society and its social programs and norms. The pandemic is further exposing how untenable this situation has become and can only be resolved by establishing human-centred public enterprises capable of research and development and delivery of pharmaceuticals needed by the people. This modern approach would eliminate the making of maximum private profit for remedies and vaccines which is now blocking the mass distribution of vaccines to deal with COVID-19. As long as this is in the hands of the imperialist cartels the world cannot be made safe.

Globalization has taken place at lightning speed to serve the cartels and their mania for maximum profit. In doing so they are incapable of dealing with the consequences of their actions. The fight for lives is the fight for rights and this is the alternative to what the governments in the service of the rich are doing with their pay-the-rich schemes and anti-social offensive.

March 11, 2021. Boston, Massachusetts protest.

Notes

1. Pfizer Inc. is a U.S. global cartel headquartered in New York. It develops and produces medicines and vaccines for immunology, oncology, cardiology, endocrinology, and neurology. In 2020, the company had seven drugs or products that each realized more than $1 billion in gross income. Pfizer reported a total gross income of $41.908 billion for 2020 and private ownership of assets valued at $178.983 billion. In 2020, the company bought the capacity to work of 78,500 workers of which 29,400 worked in the United States.

BioNTech SE is a German biotechnology company that develops and manufactures active immunotherapies for patient-specific approaches to the treatment of diseases. It declared a gross income of 121.5 million euros in 2019 with private ownership of assets valued at 797.7 million euros. It purchased the capacity to work of 1,323 workers in 2019. 

Fosun International Limited is a Chinese global cartel headquartered in Shanghai. The cartel has operations in 16 countries engaged in every sector of the modern socialized economy, including entertainment as majority owner and operator of Cirque du Soleil. Fosun had a declared gross income of $20.7 billion in 2019 on total private ownership of assets valued at $102.6 billion while buying the capacity to work of 71,000 workers. (Wikipedia)

2. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in the late 1880s and is now part of the United States Department of Health and Human Services. The NIH conducts its own scientific research through its Intramural Research Program and provides major biomedical research funding to private non-NIH research facilities through its Extramural Research Program.

As of 2013, the Intramural Research Program had 1,200 principal investigators and more than 4,000 postdoctoral fellows in basic, translational, and clinical research, being the largest biomedical research institution in the world. Translational research includes two areas of translation. One is the process of applying discoveries generated during research in the laboratory and in preclinical studies to the development of trials and studies in humans.

As of 2003, the extramural arm of the NIH provided 28 per cent of biomedical research funding spent annually in the U.S., or about $26.4 billion. (Wikipedia)

(With files from New York Times article: Pfizer Reaps Hundreds of Millions in Profits from COVID Vaccine.)

This article was published in

Volume 51 Number 5 - May 9, 2021

Article Link:
https://cpcml.ca/Tmlm2021/Articles/M510052.HTM

    

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