Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis
Posted: Fri Jul 02, 2021 1:37 pm
Cuba’s Vaccine Shield and the Five Monopolies that Structure the World: The Twenty-Sixth Newsletter (2021)
JULY 1, 2021
Español
Raúl Martínez (Cuba), Yo he visto (‘I Have Seen’), n.d.
Dear friends,
Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
In 1869, at the age of fifteen, José Martí and his young friends published a magazine in Cuba called La Patria Libre (‘The Free Homeland’), which adopted a strong position against Spanish imperialism. The first and only issue of the magazine carried Martí’s poem, ‘Abdala’. The poem is about a young man, Abdala, who goes off to fight against all odds to free his native land, which Martí calls Nubia. ‘Neither laurels nor crowns are needed for those who breathe courage’, Martí wrote. ‘Let us run to the fight … to war, valiant ones’. And in the rousing address by Abdala, comes these lyrical words:
Let the warlike valour of our souls
Serve you, my homeland, as a shield.
Martí was arrested and sentenced to six years of hard labour. Eventually, the Spanish imperial government sent the young Cuban into exile in 1871. He spent this time – much of it in New York – writing patriotic poems, producing political essays and commentary, and organising the resistance to Spanish imperialism. He returned home in 1895, only to be killed shortly afterwards in a skirmish, his legacy cemented in the war against the Spanish in 1898 and in the Cuban Revolution that began in 1959.
The lines from Martí about the ‘warlike valour’ serving as the country’s ‘shield’ form the basis for the name of the new Cuban vaccine, Abdala. This vaccine, the fifth to be produced in Cuba, was developed by the Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (CIGB) in Havana. In announcing the results of their trials, BioCubaFarma, the country’s leading biotechnology and pharmaceutical institution, noted that it had an efficacy rate of 92.28%, almost as high as the efficacy rate of the vaccines by Pfizer (95%) and Moderna (94.1%). The vaccine is administered in three doses, each given with a two-week gap. The Cuban authorities plan to vaccinate three quarters of the population by September. Already, more than 2.23 million vaccines have been administered to the 11 million Cubans on the island, 1.346 million people have been vaccinated with at least one dose, 770,390 with the second dose, and 148,738 with the third dose.
Juan Roberto Diago Durruthy (Cuba), Tu lugar (‘Your Place’), 2006.
Cuba has already planned to export its vaccines to countries around the world and has now produced five different vaccine candidates, including Soberana 02 and the needle-free intranasal vaccine, Mambisa. The latter, which holds great promise for vaccine administration in low-resource countries, is named after guerrilla soldiers who fought in the Ten Year War (1868-1878) for independence from Spain.
Each of these vaccines has been developed under conditions of duress imposed by the illegal US blockade. Since 1992, the UN General Assembly has voted annually against the US blockade, except for 2020, when, due to the pandemic, there was no vote. On 23 June 2021, 184 member states of the United Nations again voted to end this blockade. In the context of the coronavirus pandemic, Cuba’s foreign minister, Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, said, ‘Like the virus, the blockade asphyxiates and kills. It must stop’. One of the casualties of the blockade has been Cuba’s inability to buy ventilators to treat critically ill patients, since the two Swiss companies (IMT Medical AG and Acutronic) who made them were purchased by a US company (Vyaire Medical, Inc.) in April 2020. Cuba has now developed its own ventilator in response.
At the same time, Cuba suffers from a shortage of syringes. Syringe manufacturers are entangled in one way or another with the US pharmaceutical industry. Terumo (Japan) and Nipro (Japan) have operations in the United States, while B. Braun Melsungen AG (Germany) is in a partnership with Concordance Healthcare Solutions (US). An Indian syringe firm, Hindustan Syringes & Medical Devices Ltd., is linked to Envigo (US), which brings US government scrutiny to the Indian firm. In an act of concrete solidarity, a campaign is underway to raise funds towards the purchase of syringes for Cuba.
Belkis Ayón (Cuba), La consagración III (‘The Consecration III’), 1991.
The Our World in Data project calculates that, as of 29 June, just over 3 billion doses have been administered worldwide, which amount to less than 1 billion people out of the 7.7 billion in the world who have been vaccinated. Just over 23% of the world population has had their first vaccine shot. But the data shows that vaccination drives have been predictably uneven. In low-income countries, only 0.9% of the population has received at least one dose of the vaccine. In April 2021, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Gheybreysus said, ‘There remains a shocking imbalance in the global distribution of vaccines. On average in high-income countries, almost one in four people has received a vaccine. In low-income countries, it’s one in more than 500. Let me repeat that: one in four versus one in 500’. By May 2021, Ghebreyesus said that the world was in a situation of ‘vaccine apartheid’.
In February 2021, in one of our newsletters, Tricontinental: Institute of Social Research noted that we lived in a time of ‘three apartheids’. These apartheids include that of food, money, and medicine. At the heart of the medical apartheid is vaccine nationalism, vaccine hoarding, and, as Ghebreyesus put it, vaccine apartheid. Matters are quite grave. The COVAX vaccine alliance has seen vaccines move out of its reach both because of bilateral deals being made between the richer countries and the vaccine makers and because of the lack of financial support from the richer states to the poorer ones. The trends show that many countries will not see significant enough numbers of their population vaccinated before 2023, ‘if it happens at all’, says the Economist Intelligence Unit.
Raúl Corrales Fornos (Cuba), La caballería (‘The Cavalry’), 1960.
What is the cause of these three apartheids? The control that a handful of companies exercise over the global economy, driven by five types of monopolies, as our friend, the late Samir Amin, laid out:
1.The monopoly over science and technology
2.The monopoly over financial systems
3.The monopoly over access to resources
4.The monopoly over weaponry
5.The monopoly over communications
We are looking closely at this list and the relationship between each of these elements, analysing it to see if anything has been left out. Amin argued that it is not the lack of industrialisation alone that impacts the subordination of countries; what has kept the world in a situation of great inequality, he suggested, were these five monopolies. After all, many countries in the world have developed industries over the past fifty years but remain unable to advance the social agenda of their populations.
Central to the discussion about vaccine apartheid are at least two of these monopolies: the monopoly over finance and the monopoly over science and technology. A lack of finances in hand draws many of the world’s states to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), to various public investors (the Paris Club), or to commercial capital (the London Club). These financiers take their lead from the IMF, which has demanded that countries cut back on several crucial areas of human life – education and health care, for instance. Cutting funds for education drains countries’ potential to develop sufficient numbers of scientists as well as the scientific temper necessary to create essential technologies such as vaccine candidates. Cutting funds for health care systems and adopting intellectual property rules that block the transfer of technology leaves countries disarmed from being able to appropriately deal with the pandemic.
A lack of funds has driven many states to surrender the possibility that they could advance the well-being of their populations (as of April 2020, sixty-four countries spend more to service their debt than on healthcare). It is not enough to demand the transfer of technology to states in the midst of a pandemic so that they can make the vaccine. Technology is yesterday’s science; science is tomorrow’s technology.
To use the social wealth of a population, to teach science, and to establish a basic norm of scientific literacy are essential lessons of the pandemic. These are lessons well-learnt by the Cubans. This is why Cuba has, against all odds, developed five different vaccines. Abdala and Cuba’s four other vaccines stand as a shield against COVID-19. These vaccines emerge out of the social productivity of socialist Cuba, which has not surrendered to the ugliness of the five monopolies.
Warmly,
Vijay
https://thetricontinental.org/newslette ... -vaccines/
*************************************
Campaign for the Elimination of Patents
July 1, 2021
By Pasqualina Curcio – Jun 28, 2021
A debate has been going on worldwide about the exemption of COVID-19 vaccine patents. The director general of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom, warned governments and pharmaceutical companies that “unless we eliminate the virus everywhere, we could end up back at square one.” This statement is mainly due to the fact that the longer we take to vaccinate the world’s population, the more likely the coronavirus will mutate and evade vaccines, making them less effective in containing the disease. A clear example has been Brazil, where several experts warn that it could become a “factory” of variants capable of escaping the effectiveness of vaccines, which, as Adhanom warned, could lead us back to the starting point of the pandemic.
The issue of potential COVID-19 variants is not just a small detail towards understanding why the pharmaceutical industry has flatly refused the request made by governments and the United Nations to lift the patents and, therefore, has not wanted to transfer its licenses, knowledge and technology so that other companies can join in the mass production of vaccines and thus immunize the world’s population in the shortest possible time.
It is estimated that between 10 and 14 billion doses are required by 2021 to guarantee the immunization of 80% of the 7.7 billion people living on the planet, a production capacity that the pharmaceutical companies that have developed the vaccines do not have. In addition, and as if this were not enough, more than two thirds of this total has already been demanded and committed to rich countries, according to reports by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations.
There are two main obstacles to rapid and effective immunization. First, low production levels due to the low capacity of the companies that have developed the vaccine. Secondly, the unequal distribution of the vaccines produced, which are being shamelessly monopolized by rich countries that have enough vaccines to immunize three or four times their population.
To date, according to the WHO, three quarters of the vaccinated people live in 10 rich countries that account for 60% of the world’s GDP, while 130 countries, home to 2.5 billion people, have barely been able to start vaccinating. Médecins Sans Frontières reports that if the first two billion doses of vaccines were distributed in proportion to the population of each country, global mortality could be reduced by 61%. On the other hand, if the 47 richest countries monopolize the doses, the reduction will be only 33%.
The question that arises is: what are the real reasons for the pharmaceutical industry to refuse to cede its licenses and transfer technology and knowledge, despite the fact that this is a highly contagious and lethal disease that has not only surpassed the healthcare capacity of even high-income countries, but has also claimed the lives of almost four million people, and has had a tremendous impact on the economy and world poverty. What explains the behavior of this industry, knowing that the pandemic will not be controlled until we are all protected? We have two answers to this question.
The first is to avoid a precedent in the relaxation of the mechanism of intellectual property rights that would put at risk the substantial profits, not only associated not only with COVID-19, but also with its healthcare business.
Above the financial sector and after the oil and defense industries, pharmaceuticals is the third-largest profit maker worldwide. Before the pandemic, in 2019, its revenues were estimated at $700 billion USD a year. Patents are nothing more than the legalization of monopolies that grant, for at least 20 years, exclusivity in the production and marketing of medicines, generating a negative effect on access to these goods that are very necessary for the health and life of the people.
Patents grant great power, not only economic but also political, to the pharmaceutical industry. Imagine the power that the owners of the private companies that have developed COVID-19 vaccine candidates currently have. They have the power to decide on the health and lives of literally the entire world. To allow patent flexibilities is to surrender that power.
Secondly, with an estimated average price of $15 USD per vaccine dose multiplied by the 14 billion required this year, the patent relaxation would imply for these few companies, not only to share revenues in the order of $200 billion (an additional 28% on the $700 billion that they regularly, without a pandemic, earn each year) but also to share future revenues related to boosters and new vaccines, depending on the variants.
The pharmaceutical industry has estimated that the virus will not be eradicated with this year’s vaccination, but that third doses and new vaccines will be required due to the appearance of variants. The application of a third dose implies an average of $100 billion of additional revenue for the industry. Relaxing patents and handing over their know-how and technology will put them in the vaccine business for years to come. Eliminating patents puts at stake billions of dollars that the pharmaceutical industry would stop earning. In fact, according to Forbes magazine: “Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson have told investors that they will raise vaccine prices as soon as the pandemic phase is over. Vaccine makers are well aware of the real possibility that people will need annual booster shots and see this as an opportunity to increase revenues.”
We should remember that, incidentally, these companies did not even invest in the research and development of the vaccines. The financing was mainly from the governments with resources coming from our taxes, as it is also the governments that buy and pay for them. It is the case that, in an identical manner, patents work for other drugs, whether they are used to prevent, cure or treat other diseases. COVID-19 is just one more example of the perverse effects of the commercialization of health and patents, which are part of an exploitative and unjust system such as capitalism.
It is not enough for the peoples of the world, governments and international organizations to timidly request the temporary relaxation of patents on the vaccine against COVID-19. The campaign that we must undertake is for the elimination of all patents. The right to property, in this case intellectual property, cannot be above the right to health and life. That is not humane.
https://orinocotribune.com/campaign-for ... f-patents/
Property is not only theft, it is murder.
JULY 1, 2021
Español
Raúl Martínez (Cuba), Yo he visto (‘I Have Seen’), n.d.
Dear friends,
Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
In 1869, at the age of fifteen, José Martí and his young friends published a magazine in Cuba called La Patria Libre (‘The Free Homeland’), which adopted a strong position against Spanish imperialism. The first and only issue of the magazine carried Martí’s poem, ‘Abdala’. The poem is about a young man, Abdala, who goes off to fight against all odds to free his native land, which Martí calls Nubia. ‘Neither laurels nor crowns are needed for those who breathe courage’, Martí wrote. ‘Let us run to the fight … to war, valiant ones’. And in the rousing address by Abdala, comes these lyrical words:
Let the warlike valour of our souls
Serve you, my homeland, as a shield.
Martí was arrested and sentenced to six years of hard labour. Eventually, the Spanish imperial government sent the young Cuban into exile in 1871. He spent this time – much of it in New York – writing patriotic poems, producing political essays and commentary, and organising the resistance to Spanish imperialism. He returned home in 1895, only to be killed shortly afterwards in a skirmish, his legacy cemented in the war against the Spanish in 1898 and in the Cuban Revolution that began in 1959.
The lines from Martí about the ‘warlike valour’ serving as the country’s ‘shield’ form the basis for the name of the new Cuban vaccine, Abdala. This vaccine, the fifth to be produced in Cuba, was developed by the Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (CIGB) in Havana. In announcing the results of their trials, BioCubaFarma, the country’s leading biotechnology and pharmaceutical institution, noted that it had an efficacy rate of 92.28%, almost as high as the efficacy rate of the vaccines by Pfizer (95%) and Moderna (94.1%). The vaccine is administered in three doses, each given with a two-week gap. The Cuban authorities plan to vaccinate three quarters of the population by September. Already, more than 2.23 million vaccines have been administered to the 11 million Cubans on the island, 1.346 million people have been vaccinated with at least one dose, 770,390 with the second dose, and 148,738 with the third dose.
Juan Roberto Diago Durruthy (Cuba), Tu lugar (‘Your Place’), 2006.
Cuba has already planned to export its vaccines to countries around the world and has now produced five different vaccine candidates, including Soberana 02 and the needle-free intranasal vaccine, Mambisa. The latter, which holds great promise for vaccine administration in low-resource countries, is named after guerrilla soldiers who fought in the Ten Year War (1868-1878) for independence from Spain.
Each of these vaccines has been developed under conditions of duress imposed by the illegal US blockade. Since 1992, the UN General Assembly has voted annually against the US blockade, except for 2020, when, due to the pandemic, there was no vote. On 23 June 2021, 184 member states of the United Nations again voted to end this blockade. In the context of the coronavirus pandemic, Cuba’s foreign minister, Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, said, ‘Like the virus, the blockade asphyxiates and kills. It must stop’. One of the casualties of the blockade has been Cuba’s inability to buy ventilators to treat critically ill patients, since the two Swiss companies (IMT Medical AG and Acutronic) who made them were purchased by a US company (Vyaire Medical, Inc.) in April 2020. Cuba has now developed its own ventilator in response.
At the same time, Cuba suffers from a shortage of syringes. Syringe manufacturers are entangled in one way or another with the US pharmaceutical industry. Terumo (Japan) and Nipro (Japan) have operations in the United States, while B. Braun Melsungen AG (Germany) is in a partnership with Concordance Healthcare Solutions (US). An Indian syringe firm, Hindustan Syringes & Medical Devices Ltd., is linked to Envigo (US), which brings US government scrutiny to the Indian firm. In an act of concrete solidarity, a campaign is underway to raise funds towards the purchase of syringes for Cuba.
Belkis Ayón (Cuba), La consagración III (‘The Consecration III’), 1991.
The Our World in Data project calculates that, as of 29 June, just over 3 billion doses have been administered worldwide, which amount to less than 1 billion people out of the 7.7 billion in the world who have been vaccinated. Just over 23% of the world population has had their first vaccine shot. But the data shows that vaccination drives have been predictably uneven. In low-income countries, only 0.9% of the population has received at least one dose of the vaccine. In April 2021, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Gheybreysus said, ‘There remains a shocking imbalance in the global distribution of vaccines. On average in high-income countries, almost one in four people has received a vaccine. In low-income countries, it’s one in more than 500. Let me repeat that: one in four versus one in 500’. By May 2021, Ghebreyesus said that the world was in a situation of ‘vaccine apartheid’.
In February 2021, in one of our newsletters, Tricontinental: Institute of Social Research noted that we lived in a time of ‘three apartheids’. These apartheids include that of food, money, and medicine. At the heart of the medical apartheid is vaccine nationalism, vaccine hoarding, and, as Ghebreyesus put it, vaccine apartheid. Matters are quite grave. The COVAX vaccine alliance has seen vaccines move out of its reach both because of bilateral deals being made between the richer countries and the vaccine makers and because of the lack of financial support from the richer states to the poorer ones. The trends show that many countries will not see significant enough numbers of their population vaccinated before 2023, ‘if it happens at all’, says the Economist Intelligence Unit.
Raúl Corrales Fornos (Cuba), La caballería (‘The Cavalry’), 1960.
What is the cause of these three apartheids? The control that a handful of companies exercise over the global economy, driven by five types of monopolies, as our friend, the late Samir Amin, laid out:
1.The monopoly over science and technology
2.The monopoly over financial systems
3.The monopoly over access to resources
4.The monopoly over weaponry
5.The monopoly over communications
We are looking closely at this list and the relationship between each of these elements, analysing it to see if anything has been left out. Amin argued that it is not the lack of industrialisation alone that impacts the subordination of countries; what has kept the world in a situation of great inequality, he suggested, were these five monopolies. After all, many countries in the world have developed industries over the past fifty years but remain unable to advance the social agenda of their populations.
Central to the discussion about vaccine apartheid are at least two of these monopolies: the monopoly over finance and the monopoly over science and technology. A lack of finances in hand draws many of the world’s states to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), to various public investors (the Paris Club), or to commercial capital (the London Club). These financiers take their lead from the IMF, which has demanded that countries cut back on several crucial areas of human life – education and health care, for instance. Cutting funds for education drains countries’ potential to develop sufficient numbers of scientists as well as the scientific temper necessary to create essential technologies such as vaccine candidates. Cutting funds for health care systems and adopting intellectual property rules that block the transfer of technology leaves countries disarmed from being able to appropriately deal with the pandemic.
A lack of funds has driven many states to surrender the possibility that they could advance the well-being of their populations (as of April 2020, sixty-four countries spend more to service their debt than on healthcare). It is not enough to demand the transfer of technology to states in the midst of a pandemic so that they can make the vaccine. Technology is yesterday’s science; science is tomorrow’s technology.
To use the social wealth of a population, to teach science, and to establish a basic norm of scientific literacy are essential lessons of the pandemic. These are lessons well-learnt by the Cubans. This is why Cuba has, against all odds, developed five different vaccines. Abdala and Cuba’s four other vaccines stand as a shield against COVID-19. These vaccines emerge out of the social productivity of socialist Cuba, which has not surrendered to the ugliness of the five monopolies.
Warmly,
Vijay
https://thetricontinental.org/newslette ... -vaccines/
*************************************
Campaign for the Elimination of Patents
July 1, 2021
By Pasqualina Curcio – Jun 28, 2021
A debate has been going on worldwide about the exemption of COVID-19 vaccine patents. The director general of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom, warned governments and pharmaceutical companies that “unless we eliminate the virus everywhere, we could end up back at square one.” This statement is mainly due to the fact that the longer we take to vaccinate the world’s population, the more likely the coronavirus will mutate and evade vaccines, making them less effective in containing the disease. A clear example has been Brazil, where several experts warn that it could become a “factory” of variants capable of escaping the effectiveness of vaccines, which, as Adhanom warned, could lead us back to the starting point of the pandemic.
The issue of potential COVID-19 variants is not just a small detail towards understanding why the pharmaceutical industry has flatly refused the request made by governments and the United Nations to lift the patents and, therefore, has not wanted to transfer its licenses, knowledge and technology so that other companies can join in the mass production of vaccines and thus immunize the world’s population in the shortest possible time.
It is estimated that between 10 and 14 billion doses are required by 2021 to guarantee the immunization of 80% of the 7.7 billion people living on the planet, a production capacity that the pharmaceutical companies that have developed the vaccines do not have. In addition, and as if this were not enough, more than two thirds of this total has already been demanded and committed to rich countries, according to reports by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations.
There are two main obstacles to rapid and effective immunization. First, low production levels due to the low capacity of the companies that have developed the vaccine. Secondly, the unequal distribution of the vaccines produced, which are being shamelessly monopolized by rich countries that have enough vaccines to immunize three or four times their population.
To date, according to the WHO, three quarters of the vaccinated people live in 10 rich countries that account for 60% of the world’s GDP, while 130 countries, home to 2.5 billion people, have barely been able to start vaccinating. Médecins Sans Frontières reports that if the first two billion doses of vaccines were distributed in proportion to the population of each country, global mortality could be reduced by 61%. On the other hand, if the 47 richest countries monopolize the doses, the reduction will be only 33%.
The question that arises is: what are the real reasons for the pharmaceutical industry to refuse to cede its licenses and transfer technology and knowledge, despite the fact that this is a highly contagious and lethal disease that has not only surpassed the healthcare capacity of even high-income countries, but has also claimed the lives of almost four million people, and has had a tremendous impact on the economy and world poverty. What explains the behavior of this industry, knowing that the pandemic will not be controlled until we are all protected? We have two answers to this question.
The first is to avoid a precedent in the relaxation of the mechanism of intellectual property rights that would put at risk the substantial profits, not only associated not only with COVID-19, but also with its healthcare business.
Above the financial sector and after the oil and defense industries, pharmaceuticals is the third-largest profit maker worldwide. Before the pandemic, in 2019, its revenues were estimated at $700 billion USD a year. Patents are nothing more than the legalization of monopolies that grant, for at least 20 years, exclusivity in the production and marketing of medicines, generating a negative effect on access to these goods that are very necessary for the health and life of the people.
Patents grant great power, not only economic but also political, to the pharmaceutical industry. Imagine the power that the owners of the private companies that have developed COVID-19 vaccine candidates currently have. They have the power to decide on the health and lives of literally the entire world. To allow patent flexibilities is to surrender that power.
Secondly, with an estimated average price of $15 USD per vaccine dose multiplied by the 14 billion required this year, the patent relaxation would imply for these few companies, not only to share revenues in the order of $200 billion (an additional 28% on the $700 billion that they regularly, without a pandemic, earn each year) but also to share future revenues related to boosters and new vaccines, depending on the variants.
The pharmaceutical industry has estimated that the virus will not be eradicated with this year’s vaccination, but that third doses and new vaccines will be required due to the appearance of variants. The application of a third dose implies an average of $100 billion of additional revenue for the industry. Relaxing patents and handing over their know-how and technology will put them in the vaccine business for years to come. Eliminating patents puts at stake billions of dollars that the pharmaceutical industry would stop earning. In fact, according to Forbes magazine: “Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson have told investors that they will raise vaccine prices as soon as the pandemic phase is over. Vaccine makers are well aware of the real possibility that people will need annual booster shots and see this as an opportunity to increase revenues.”
We should remember that, incidentally, these companies did not even invest in the research and development of the vaccines. The financing was mainly from the governments with resources coming from our taxes, as it is also the governments that buy and pay for them. It is the case that, in an identical manner, patents work for other drugs, whether they are used to prevent, cure or treat other diseases. COVID-19 is just one more example of the perverse effects of the commercialization of health and patents, which are part of an exploitative and unjust system such as capitalism.
It is not enough for the peoples of the world, governments and international organizations to timidly request the temporary relaxation of patents on the vaccine against COVID-19. The campaign that we must undertake is for the elimination of all patents. The right to property, in this case intellectual property, cannot be above the right to health and life. That is not humane.
https://orinocotribune.com/campaign-for ... f-patents/
Property is not only theft, it is murder.