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Urgent Need to Humanize the Natural and Social Environment! Pfizer-BioNTech Demands Canada Pay Premium for Vaccine
As the pandemic swept across the country last fall, Health Canada's chief medical adviser Dr. Supriya Sharma signalled that her department was about to approve the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for broad public use, which it did on December 9. Subsequently, the government approached the cartel to deliver the vaccine before the contracted date. CP writes the Canadian government "[raced] back to Pfizer to see if its contract could be amended to get some doses delivered early. On December 4, Canada and Pfizer signed an amendment allowing for that, but at a cost. 'Whereas [the] purchaser has requested, and Pfizer has agreed .... to amend the delivery schedule so that a certain number of contracted doses are delivered prior to January 1, 2021 and in consideration thereof the parties have agreed to increase the price contracted for doses which are delivered prior to January 1, 2021,' the [new] contract says. Every detail in the contract related to the price paid was deleted before the documents were made public. "The specifics of what Canada paid for the 250 million doses of vaccine it pre-purchased have been hard to come by. The 2021 budget released in April said the total was somewhere around $9 billion." The redacted versions angered members of Parliament's health committee as it had specifically issued an order for unredacted documents. Writing on Twitter, NDP health critic Don Davies expressed frustration that the government ignored the committee's order: "After months of dogged work the opposition finally got Canada's vaccine contracts. Predictably, Liberals released them late on a Friday with barely a week left in the session. Predictably, they redacted them in violation of the House Order." Liberal government Procurement Minister Anita Anand says the eight contracts with Big Pharma contain confidentiality clauses that prevent her from releasing them, adding she is not going to violate those clauses and risk jeopardizing Canada's vaccine supply.
Among other issues, the pandemic has exposed the absence of a Canadian controlled pharmaceutical sector. The exposure entails both the absence of any viable pharmaceutical sector but also importantly one that is under the control of Canadians as a human-centred enterprise dedicated to serving the well-being and health care of Canadians and not aimed at private profit for the oligarchs. A human-centred pharmaceutical sector would also be assigned the social responsibility to arm Canadians with scientific literacy, to give them confidence in the drugs that are being offered, including vaccines. At present, many Canadians are rightly sceptical of the drug industry as the aim is maximum private profit. Big Pharma spends enormous amounts to push their drugs on people, such as opiates, causing criminal damage to the health and well-being of the people. Governments collude with the oligarchs and facilitate their practices and sales. This has to stop. Big Pharma must be restricted not just from harming Canadians but from blocking the development of an independent pharmaceutical sector under the control of the people.
If Big Pharma would want to continue to sell its drugs in Canada, the government should force the global cartels to sell only through pharmacare, reveal all scientific knowledge connected with the drugs in question and make it available publicly. It should also demand the details of the price of production of the drugs to establish a legitimate market price for pharmacare to pay. Pharmacare would also restrict Big Pharma from pushing its drugs on Canadians through any form of advertising or promotions through the medical system where it has influence. The pandemic has made clear the necessity to build a human-centred pharmaceutical sector complete with a modern pharmacare system.
This article was published in Article Link:   Website: www.cpcml.ca Email: editor@cpcml.ca |
The Canadian
Press (CP) reports that Pfizer-BioNTech demanded
extra money from the Canadian government to
deliver vaccines several weeks earlier than
originally planned. The details are contained in
heavily redacted contracts with the private
global pharmaceutical cartels released to the
House of Commons health committee in June. The
government contracted with the U.S. Pfizer and
German-based BioNTech cartels last year to buy
20 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine. The
versions released to MPs on the committee are
redacted with price and delivery schedules
deleted.
Quite a comment
that telling the truth about a government
business arrangement with private interests
could "jeopardize" the health and life of
Canadians. The truth in fact goes beyond deals
with the devil and to the heart of the matter.
Canadians do not control their health care
system and the research and production of the
supplies and modern equipment it requires. The
global oligarchs who control the sector view
Canadians as they view all earth's peoples -- as
consumers that must pay for the commodities the
oligarchs own and control. Pay up and make us
rich or suffer the consequences is their mafia
mantra.
In addition to
human-centred pharmaceutical enterprises, the
government also needs to establish a pharmacare
system to distribute all drugs in Canada under
strict regulations and make them available to
all in need through a genuinely universal and
free system. The cornerstone or foundation of
such a modern pharmacare system has to be
human-centred pharmaceutical enterprises that
engage in public research and develop
pharmaceuticals in which Canadians are confident
and over which they exercise control.
Pharmacare's receipt of payment for drugs would
allow the human-centred enterprises to do
research, develop and produce necessary
pharmaceuticals and educate Canadians in
pharmacology and draw attention to the social
conditions that cause many diseases and injuries
and the actions necessary to change those
conditions.