Big Pharma: Greed Is God
I’ve been reading Empire of Pain, Patrick Radden Keefe’s remarkable book about the Sackler dynasty and their pharmaceutical wasteland — including the opioid scourge. (What a writer and researcher! I had to leap into his latest book after just finishing his haunting book about the Irish Troubles, Say Nothing.) As I descend with Keefe into his page-turning book about the Sacklers, I’ve also been following the harrowing news from India and Latin America about the Covid killing fields in those tragic countries. Once again, the pharmaceutical giants are profiteering from pain, favoring the wealthy imperialist nations and blocking growing campaigns to transfer their vaccination technology to suffering nations. Drug giants like Pfizer and Moderna would rather get charity points, dispensing some additional shots to India — where more than 3,000 people a day are dying from Covid — than break their trade patents and share their life-saving secrets with foreign drug manufacturers.
Tulsa University was the first institution to strip the Sackler name from its buildings, in 2019.
To his credit, Dr. Anthony Fauci — the nation’s point man on the Covid crisis — has urged President Biden to break the international trade pact favoring Big Pharma. After all, Moderna developed its highly effective Covid vaccine with a huge assist from U.S. taxpayers. And the global coronavirus crisis has already ensured that vaccine makers will reap staggering profits this year. “I always respect the needs of the (drug) companies to protect their interests to keep them in business,” recently said Fauci, who as a long-term U.S. health official knows he must appease the all-powerful pharmaceutical industry. “But we can’t do it completely at the expense of not allowing vaccine that’s life-saving to get to the people who need it.”
Women in India mourn their dead loved ones, as hospitals there run out of oxygen supplies.
As Biden himself has noted, the U.S. is not a walled island. The virus respects no borders. So the suffering of people in India and Brazil and South Africa will soon be OUR suffering. Already medical workers in India’s Covid wards who have been fully inoculated are starting to be sickened with Covid variants. The more we allow Big Pharma greed to block the global distribution of vaccines, the more we risk new waves of infection, even among those who have been immunized in the West. We’re all in this together.
Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel
During earlier global health emergencies, like the AIDS crisis, foreign governments finally moved to break Big Pharma patents and manufacture life-saving drugs. In the 1980s, an Indian drug manufacturer broke a lock on hepatitis B vaccine held tightly by Merck and Glaxo-Smith-Kline, after the World Health Organization urgently recommended the vaccine for children. Big Pharma was charging $23 per shot; the Indian manufacturer offered it for $1 a dose.
It’s time for President Biden and other Western leaders to pick life over greed. If they read one book this month, it should be Empire of Pain.