During this global pandemic’s harsh weeks, numerous statements have been made by government spokespersons, as well as many media editorials highlighting the great collaboration between governments, companies and entities, to rise "all together" from this crisis and end the drama caused by Covid-19.
However, not only does reality expose that the measures applied by the capitalist governments are benefiting a negligible minority, the business elite. But also, after watching their cuts and privatizations turning nursing homes into slaughterhouses, after seeing their attacks on public health causing a wild spread of the disease and the death of friends and relatives due to the absence of resources in public hospitals; after all that, we are now witnessing a new chapter in the harshness of capitalism.
We are bearing witness to a dantesque spectacle: the savage competition between pharmaceutical companies and private laboratories, in a rat race to cross the finish line first and find a drug or vaccine for SARS-CoV-2. The ultimate goal is not putting an end to the disease but to do business with the health of billions of people around the world.
The hypocrisy of capitalist governments
The “donors conference” organized by the European Commission (EC) was held on May 4thwith the aim of obtaining adequate funding for research into the vaccine for coronavirus. With the participation of representatives of the G-20 countries, the President of the EC – Ursula Von der Leyen – reported on the participation of world leaders from 40 countries and a collection of €7.4 billion. But the bombastic announcement cannot hide the absences of countries such as the United States, Russia and India, the testimonial presence of China without any financial contribution, and the fact that the UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, estimated that €38,000 million were needed – that is to say, five times more than collected.
Nor can it hide the growing disputes between the different EU governments that reflect the clashes between the different national bourgeoisies in the scenario of the current global economic crisis. Clashes that have even been appreciated in the health field when the Merkel and Macron governments dried up funds for health exports to Italy, while the transalpine country was going through its peak of deaths and infections.
The United States’ suspension of financing to the World Health Organization (WHO) showcases the enormous instability that the capitalist world is going through, with terrifying economic prospects, and places the intensification of the trade war with China in the foreground.
Ignoring the sham on unity and collaboration between governments, one can recognize the struggle between the different countries’ capitalists to increase or, at least, preserve their market shares and maintain their rate of profits. The operating logic of capitalism is revealed to be contrary to the health and protection of the majority of the population.
The business of pharmaceutical companies and private laboratories
Currently, more than 1700 clinical trials related to Covid-19 are being carried out in parallel – most of them are private. These projects, despite receiving huge amounts of public money, are being carried out like any scientific discovery under capitalism – in secret and mistrust.
The system is perverse: just as an entrepreneur in the automotive sector does not share with his competition an engineering improvement that would make his car more secure, or a businessman in the construction sector does not reveal to his competition a more efficient and reliable method inbuilding construction, an entrepreneur whose business is to manufacture vaccines or medicines keeps his progress to himself with the aim of being the first to achieve it and thus claim most of the deal. It is absurd and socially nonsensical. But this is how capitalism works. Deep collaboration between companies is a pipe dream, because the immediate interests of the owners of those companies are always imposed. Instead, what we find is fierce competition to see who reaches the finishing line of this multi-million-dollar-award race first.
For the pharmaceutical industry, Covid-19 is a huge business opportunity with which it hopes to fulfill its billing forecasts for this year – more than 1.32 trillion euros –, which is practically equivalent to Spain's GDP.
The fifteen most important pharmaceutical companies control more than half of the world market, and the companies that lead the most advanced projects for the discovery of the vaccine can be found in the top places: American PFIZER and JOHNSON & JOHNSON (52,540 and 36,256 million dollars in salesin 2017, respectively), Swiss ROCHE (41,110 million) and French SANOFI (36,663 million dollars). These have established strategic alliances with biomedical and biotechnological laboratories and companies such as BIONTECH or EMERGENT BIOSOLUTIONS, as well as with several Institutes and Foundations. China, with its particular system of state capitalism, is also very well positioned with three projects led by Chinese pharmaceutical companies SINOPHARM and SINOVAC and the company CANSINO BIOLOGICS. The business deals we are witnessing seek to control the entire vaccine process: discovery, large-scale production, and mass vaccination campaigns.
Entrepreneurs in the pharmaceutical sector are making a killing at the expense of our health. Also, their business is not based on our healing, but on us continuing to buy their products. In this process, there are also obscure practices that pharmaceutical companies carry out, such as inflating the cost prices of medicines –which are actually 10 times lower, according to Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) – to justify expensive sales prices and bribing doctors to recommend the use of their products. According to the 2014 “The Access to Medicine index” ranking carried out by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, 18 of the 20 pharmaceutical multinationals analyzed had been sanctioned for this reason.
Of course, the pharmaceutical companies not only receive millions of euros of public funding directly through donations from the differentStates, but also take advantage of the research carried out by government and university laboratories, both financed by our taxes.
For example, the 2018 study "Medicines for cancer: high prices and inequality", carried out by sociologist Irene Bernal and pharmacist Eva Iráizoz within the framework of the "Not healthy" medical campaign, reported that ROCHE's flagship product against breast cancer, Trastuzumab – which by then had provided more than €60 billion of revenue worldwide – was obtained through funding from universities, research centers and non-profit foundations.
Despite not being the first coronavirus suffered by humanity, studies on its possible vaccines are poorly developed. If, to date, thirty-nine coronaviruses have been registered and six of them –not counting the cause of Covid-19– have had an impact on humans, why don't we know more about them? This is not because the first coronaviruses were seasonal and only caused minor colds. The explanation is that the coronaviruses that initially caused hundreds of deaths, such as SARS-CoV (2002) and MERS-CoV (2012), stopped generating epidemics, so the immediate economic interest of the large pharmaceutical and biomedical companies plummeted and all investigations in pre-clinical phase were interrupted.
This also explains why the infrastructures available to carry out large-scale production are totally insufficient. Now that we know from a report by the China National Genomic Data Center (NGDC) that the new coronavirus is 80% similar to its predecessor SARS-CoV, the standstillin studies and research that were beingcarried out is made even more blatant. These are the horrible consequences of the private sector's monopoly over vaccine and drug research and manufacturing.
Research cuts kill as well
It is no coincidence that the two projects with the greatest scientific impact in Spain, linked to the Spanish National Research Council (Consejo Superior de InvestigacionesCientíficas, CSIC), are still in pre-clinical phase. Despite its professionals’ enormous effort and quality, the sector has suffered for years from budget cuts and the precariousness of its staff. The media campaign highlighting that "Spain is a reference country" for being the "first in clinical trials in Europe and fourth in the world" is gross manipulation.
The fact that pharmaceutical companies and private laboratories want to experiment in Spanish territory does not have to do with an enormous investment by the State in science, as they want to make us believe. The real reason is that Spaingathers the most infections in Europe, and the old continent is where Covid-19 expanded most rapidly after China – both nominally and in relation to its number of inhabitants – and the second in number of cases in the whole world. Furthermore, the pandemic has been in development for a longer time here. Carrying out these studies in Spain involves less cost for testing and is of greater scientific interest in understanding the coronavirus and finding a possible treatment.
Reality shows that from 2009 to 2018, the budget dedicated to CSIC has dropped more than 25%, from 843 million euros to 631. This same decreasing percentage applies to all Institutes linked to scientific research. 75% of the higher graduates who work at the CSIC have temporary contracts.
In addition, the budget line associated with the research is the one with the lowest execution rate – less than 30% – so that less than 1 euro is actually spent for every 3 budgeted. The Spanish State invests 285.50 euros per inhabitant compared to 593.8 on average in the EU (2016 data), 1.19% of the total state GDP, below countries such as Malaysia, Estonia and Hungary. According to data from the European Commission, since 2010 more than 12,000 researchers have left the Spanish State for failing to find a job.
All these cut policies in public research – together with the15,000-21,000 million euros taken from public health since 2009 –along with the privatizations in these sectors have unlocked a succulent business for pharmaceutical companies, clinics and private laboratories. This has taken place at the same time that research and healthcare for the majority of the population was destroyed.
To the nationalization of healthcare and private scientific companies
Despite the unproductiveness generated by jealous competition among corporations fighting tostand triumphant with the attainment of the vaccine or drug, it is clear that the magnitude of the great business that liespast the finishing line will accelerate the discovery process in relation to searches for other diseases. In this process, the logic in the healthcare field of seeking the maximum benefit in the shortest possible time is truly scary. For example, the US company MODERNA THERAPEUTICS, has managed to make a spectacular leap forward and now its study on the vaccine is one of the most advanced, having skipped animal tests.
Be that as it may, scientists estimate that it will take around 12 months to obtain a vaccine for Covid-19, so it will hardly be available until at least mid-2021. This is why several companies prefer to focus on the search of the drug in order to – once discovered – take advantage of these months and sell the drug at will. But regardless of all this, while this fierce battle between businessmen is taking place, policies applied by the capitalist governments make working families lean out into an abyss: the lack of resources in public health, in social services, in schools , together with the millions of layoffs and the pressure appliedby employers forcing workers to return to work without adequate security measures, clearly show the barbarism to which the capital dictatorship condemns us.
This nightmare must be eradicated. Yes, ending the horror that working families are experiencing is possible. To do this, we must eliminate the power of businessmen and the governments at their service, who make profit out of our efforts, our tears and our health.We must fight for the nationalization of pharmaceutical companies, clinics and private laboratories, expropriating all their laboratories and production chains without any compensation, and for the launch of a single, public network with the necessary personnel and resources for health care and biomedical research.
It is a matter of political will. This point would be essential if a true “social shield” were erected to overcome the disease and guarantee the health of the population. This is the path that the PSOE-UP coalition government should defend, instead of taking measures that benefit businessmen and leave millions of working families in the lurch. This government must immediately rectify!
Socialism is the only alternative
The search for the same vaccine under capitalism – where private profit is the engine –andunder a system in which meeting the social needs of the population is the main priority, produces completely different results. Putting all resources at the service of science and not private profit would allow a wide collaboration between the world's leading scientists and doctors through a coordinated plan for research development. Sharing scientific advances would greatly reduce the time taken to discover vaccines and drugs, saving the lives of millions of people. Not only that, but its massive production and distribution would be guaranteed for all, without having to use public resources to fatten the millionaire accounts of the businessmen in the sector. Not only is it possible, but it is absolutely necessary. But for this, it is urgent to destroy the system of pharmaceutical companies and private laboratories: capitalism, which acts as a corset for human and scientific development.
The socialist revolution is the only guarantee of progress for humanity. Let's get ready for the battle ahead! Now more than ever: it is time for struggle and organization! Socialism or barbarism!
