By Miguel Angel Hernandez, a leader of the PSL of Venezuela and the IWU-FI
31 August 2021
It is now one year and five months since the COVID-19 pandemic started. In that period, over 200 million people have caught it worldwide, and the number of deaths has risen to 4.5 million.
Thanks to scientific research and public funding, several vaccines against COVID-19 were on the market in record time.
The pandemic continues unabated. Recent waves of infection are occurring, while new, more contagious strains appear, potentially immune to existing vaccines, such as Delta, spreading worldwide. The question is: why does the pandemic persist?
What prevents COVID-19 from being definitively defeated is that there is still no generalised vaccination throughout the world; there is great inequality in the distribution of vaccines between the richest and poorest capitalist countries, making it impossible to produce “herd immunity”.
It is a consequence of the monopoly of patents held by the big pharmaceutical transnationals that control the production of vaccines. This prevents an increase in global vaccine production and mass access by all countries.
Vaccine apartheid
According to Our World in Data, governments have applied 5.1 billion jabs. Some 3 billion people, 33% of the world’s population, already have at least one dose (1). But this figure is misleading; it hides the great inequality in the global distribution of vaccines. Eighty per cent of the vaccines administered, over 3 billion injections, have been given in rich or middle-income capitalist countries (2).
(2) In an article we wrote in April this year for our journal Correspondence International, we said that a “vaccine apartheid” (3) was taking place, a product of the accumulation of millions of doses in the richest capitalist countries to the detriment of the poorest. This inequality in the global distribution of vaccines persists.
In the European Union, 75% of the adult population already has at least one dose (4). In North America (the United States and Canada), the first dose reached more than half of the population at the beginning of August (52.75 per cent). Latin America also reached that percentage (51.16%), but vaccination is concentrated in only a few countries, while others, such as Peru, Bolivia, Honduras, Guatemala, have not even vaccinated 30% of their population with one dose. And there are extreme cases such as Nicaragua, which has only 6.22% of its population with at least one dose, or Haiti, which only began its vaccination campaign on 15 July, and so far, has only vaccinated 0.22% of its population, and only 341 people are fully vaccinated (5). And Venezuela has only vaccinated 11% of the population with at least one dose, the lowest percentage in South America (6).
The situation in Europe, the United States and Canada contrast with Africa, where only 3.71% of its 1.2 billion people have been vaccinated with one dose, and only 1.58% are fully vaccinated. With countries such as Tanzania, which only started its vaccination campaign at the beginning of August, and Burundi and Eritrea where there are no vaccines at all (7).
Fabulous profits for pharmaceutical companies
While many countries are struggling to get vaccines and millions of people in the poorest countries have not been vaccinated, big pharmaceutical companies are making millions of dollars.
COVID-19 vaccines have become big business. The profits of the laboratories are growing at a dizzying rate that exceeds all expectations, adding new billionaires to the list. Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson paid out $26 billion in profits to shareholders last May (8).
Pfizer earned 9.234 billion dollars in the first half of 2021, while in the same period of 2020, its profits were 1.247 billion dollars. The US transnational grew 92% in just one year.
Moderna, with its first vaccine on the market, is an example of how tremendously lucrative the COVID-19 vaccine is. The biotech company had revenues of $4.354 billion in the second quarter of this year, compared to just $66 million in the same period last year. This represents a 6,300% increase in profits over the same period in 2020. Of its total revenue, $4.197 billion is from the vaccine against the new coronavirus, almost 100% of total turnover.
Johnson & Johnson earned a whopping $23.3 billion in the first half of this year, up 27.1% from the second quarter of 2020.
AstraZeneca, which developed a vaccine in partnership with Oxford University, tripled its profits this year compared with the second quarter of 2020. Revenues rose to $890 million.
Analysts’ projections are very promising for the pharmaceutical company. Moderna could have a turnover by the end of 2021 that is 23 times what it had last year. Pfizer could end the year with profits of 33.5 billion dollars, just for the COVID-19 vaccine, and with total revenues of between 78 and 80 billion dollars. Johnson & Johnson expects to end the year with profits between $93.8 billion and $94.6 billion. AstraZeneca expects to close in 2021 with 45% more revenue than last year (9).
All this data reflects the great potential for profits that the COVID-19 vaccines can still provide, if we consider it is likely that because of the advance of the new strains, a third dose of the vaccine or even boosters every two years will be necessary, for which the pharmaceutical companies are already preparing. Although they do not say so publicly, those who would benefit most from the persistence of the pandemic are the large laboratories.
But that their profits are growing does not mean that vaccine prices will fall. Increases in some vaccines have already occurred. Pfizer’s $17 vaccine is now costing $23, while Moderna’s $22 vaccine has increased to $30.
Wave vaccine patents and health budgets
While the imperialist powers impose austerity plans on countries in alliance with the IMF, the World Bank and the various bourgeois governments, the poorest countries receive only crumbs as donations of vaccines and health supplies and paltry humanitarian aid.
The pandemic that has killed millions of people, disrupting the lives of workers, women workers and popular sectors all over the world, cannot continue to be “managed” as a business by the CEOs of the big pharmaceutical companies. From the IWU-FI, we have been proposing that the only way to achieve the vaccination of the population in each country and at a global scale and get “herd immunity” is by wavering the patents on vaccines currently in the hands of the big pharmaceutical transnationals. By enabling all the world’s laboratories and scientists to produce at maximum capacity all the vaccines. We are in an emergency and critical measures are needed to deal with it. This is the only way to achieve vaccines for all.
Simultaneously with this, we propose more budget for health; salaries for health workers; more ICU beds; technological resources to care for patients, ventilators and preventive medicines.
Sources
(1) https://www.rtve.es/noticias/20210827/vacuna-coronavirus-mundo/2073422.shtml)
(2) https://www.eldinamo.cl/mundo/2021/08/06/oms-el-mundo-se-encuentra-en-un-periodo-de-peligro-real-por-la-vacunacion-no-equitativa/amp/
(3) “Vaccine apartheid”. International Correspondence. No. 46, April-July 2021, p. 6.
(4) https://ec.europa.eu/info/live-work-travel-eu/coronavirus-response/safe-covid-19-vaccines-europeans_es
(5) https://cnnespanol.cnn.com/2021/08/23/tasas-vacunacion-covid-paises-america-latina-orix/
(6) https://ais.paho.org/imm/IM_DosisAdmin-Vacunacion.asp
(7) https://www.abc.com.py/internacionales/2021/08/05/africa-respalda-la-peticion-de-la-oms-para-retrasar-terceras-dosis-de-vacunas/
(8) https://correspondenciadeprensa.com/?p=19887
(9) All data in this part on pharmaceutical companies’ profits are taken from: https://www.msn.com/es-mx/dinero/noticias/las-farmac-c3-a9uticas-aprovechan-el-negocio-de-las-vacunas-contra-el-covid-19-e2-80-94estos-son-6-datos-que-anticipan-sus-ganancias/ar-AANHwSZ?ocid=uxbndlbing
