Pills, Politics and Profit.

Have you ever wondered why the capitalist influenced medical profession prefers curing ills rather than preventing them? The reason is simple. More profits can be made from injecting vaccines than from preventing viruses. More income can be made from palliatives (pills) than from removing the causes of pain and stress. Medicines and vaccines which are prescribed for long term illnesses or recurring pandemics provide long term income streams and profitable returns on private investments.

The pharmaceutical industry, in particular, is capitalist profit-making on steroids. Pro-capitalist governments around the globe have been throwing money and resources amounting to billions at the pharmaceutical industry in a global effort to produce vaccines to immunise against the Covid19 virus. Yet no money or resources have been directed to preventing viruses from crossing the animal to human barrier. Clearly it is far easier for big Pharma to make profits from regular vaccine production than to eliminate viruses.

It is the pharmaceutical equivalent of capitalist builders deliberately erecting homes on flood plains, without flood barriers, in a period of rising sea levels and intensified rainfall and then when the house is swept away, telling you to ‘get used to it’ and offering to sell you another unit on exactly the same basis. From a humanist perspective, that makes no sense. However, it makes a form of inhumane capitalist sense to allow novel animal viruses to circulate among human communities and then use public money to supply us with yet another intravenous chemical.

Public Payment and Private Plunder.

And soak up public wealth they do. Pharmaceuticals even collaborate with public funded university departments to develop medicines and procedures and then patent them for profitable distribution. Nice trick that isn’t it? Get a tax-payer funded university departments graduates to do as much of the research as possible then patent the result for the benefit of a private company and its shareholders. Like other such public/private initiatives, the profits of private companies and a minority of shareholders are being subsidised by the majority of taxpayers.

But that is only half the problem with the interface of capitalism with health care. Curing patients with one – off treatments does two things to interrupt the cash flow of big Pharmacy. First, it cuts off the need for regular medications and second, it reduces the number of carriers able to transmit the disease to future patients. Hence there is no real capitalist incentive to campaign for preventative measures or create one-off cures. Indeed, it would really put the public purse in big Pharma’’s pocket if, in addition to turning their backs on virus prevention, pro-capitalist governments now made vaccination compulsory.

So it makes perfect sense to those who make money via vaccination pricks to keep producing and selling syringes and vaccines and update them when a virus mutates. So there is clearly no incentive for them, their shareholders or their elite friends in government to make a global effort to ensure viruses stay in their animal host where they can do little or no harm. Not only are governments pouring money into pharmaceutical companies, for vaccines, they are doing nothing to prevent new viruses from entering the human transport chain and clearly not enough to prevent existing ones circulating.

I think it revealing that there are no voices among the political and governing elite who are challenging this profit-based single narrative. This sole script of – vaccination is the only way forward – reveals that there is absolutely no intention by governments, politicians, medical professionals, bio-tech companies etc., of making sure that viruses, stay in their normal animal hosts, do not cross species barriers and are not allowed to spread far and wide. But this single-note tone poem by the elites (echoed by some on the left) also reveals more.

Deaths, Data and Dystopia.

Rather than change to a policy of virus prevention and elimination, the pro-capitalist elite in most countries are prepared to allow regular pandemics and repeated vaccinations to become the new normal. They prefer a dystopian nightmare of countries and communities coping with unemployment, climate change, pollution and a succession of death-dealing pandemics rather than change their preferred profit-based economic system. Using fear of the virus and the boredom of lock-down confinement along with a one note vaccine ‘saviour’ narrative, they hope the public will accept an alternative dystopia and dutifully offer up their arms for more and more jabs.

In the UK the elites only concern now is to work out how many infections and deaths they can allow before it becomes too self-defeating, too embarrassing or before people finally see through this cynical pro-capitalist strategy. It is the same strategy that political and military elites use when engaged in warfare. How many soldiers can be sacrificed to the ‘cause’ before the fathers, mothers, husbands and wives of these soldiers and humane citizens stir themselves to oppose the military action ordered by the governing elite?

The recent UK Covid19 normalisation strategy, (a staged return to capitalist profit – making) outlined in March 2021 reveals the mentality of the neo-liberal governing elite over here. The question they have openly addressed is; how many ordinary citizens can we afford to let get ill and die before we need to interfere again with our business as usual gig? Indeed, their ‘no more lock-downs’ strategy includes a cynical tactic. They are allowing a weekly gap between each phase of lifting restrictions. This ‘gap’ will allow them to examine the data on deaths and infections and in their executive offices, decide if these are too high to be acceptable or too crippling for the health service infrastructure and understaffed personnel to cope with!!!

Vaccine Nationalism/Imperialism.

Then there is the vexed question of vaccine nationalism and Imperialism. The government’s of the richest capitalist countries in Europe and North America representing less than 20% of the world’s population have purchased over 50% of available vaccine supplies. An attitude of me, me, me first – led by governing elites is rampant in the advanced countries. At the time of writing, 10 countries have already absorbed 75% of available vaccines and 130 countries have been left with none. According to reliable sources Astra Zenica and other vaccine producers are charging poor countries at least three times more than European countries to purchase each dose of vaccine.

Furthermore, the British and other involved governments have refused to lift restrictions on the vaccine formula and ingredients and thus denying poor countries the ability to manufacture the vaccine themselves. Apparently 2,400,000 (yes 2.4 million) Covid deaths globally are not enough to melt some capitalist, patent-protecting hearts. Another researcher suggest that international vaccine producers are currently charging between $6 and $75 per dose. Does this not stench of modern Imperialism?

Moreover, at the current rates of vaccination it could take six years to immunise everybody on the planet who wants to be injected. Bearing in mind that the planet is still interconnected, that the existing viruses are still mutating and that new viruses are still being released from animal to humans, the hope of a me-first strategy getting us back to any kind of pre-Covid normal is sheer Disneyland make-believe. Elite promoted ‘vaccine speak’ – echoed by various partially empty brain chambers – is meant to immunise us to concern about the unfolding brutal realities of late capitalism. Will it succeed?

Roy Ratcliffe (February 2021)