Capitalism Helped To Create The Vaccine. But It Is Harming Its Distribution.

First off, to all the doctors and scientists out there: thank you. You all deserve unquantifiable amounts of praise and recognition. You developed a 95% effective vaccine to a global pandemic in under 12 months, something relatively unheard of in the world of vaccine development. Your work has and will continue to save thousands of lives.

These companies “corporate” departments and boards, however, deserve zero praise. If anything, there is a special place in hell for people who can knowingly put profits over lives.

Pfizer and Moderna are private, for-profit companies. Stopping the pandemic was a motivator, but let’s be honest here: the reason several companies were scrambling to develop it was because there was money to be made for whoever could strike a deal.

Advocates of the free market, when the vaccine was still in development, pointed out how capitalism would indirectly create a more effective vaccine in a shorter amount of time. And they were right; it followed the exact principle that competition fuels better products.

Contrary to certain foreign governments, such as Russia, the US government left vaccine development to the private healthcare industry. The two goals for those developing the vaccine were to maximize efficiency and get it out before other companies do.

In that sense, greed was good. It increased the pace of a necessary achievement. But now, that same desire for profits is doing the exact opposite: it is costing lives, and that greed has become entangled with selfishness rather than progress.

We cannot deny the undeniable:

We Don’t Have Enough Vaccines Because They Want To Maximize Their Profits.

Moderna and Pfizer’s refusal to share the formula with its competitors makes sense from a business standpoint.

But from a moral and humanitarian standpoint, it is completely disgusting.

The Government Has The Opportunity To Actually Save Lives, For A Fraction Of What It Has Already Spent

The collective price of the 1st & 2nd coronavirus stimulus packages is roughly $3.1 trillion USD.

Additionally, our government has shown they are not afraid to give billions in subsidies to businesses and corporations. In fact, that is where a large part of the first stimulus package, worth $2.2 trillion, went.

There is a very clear and easy way to maximize vaccine production and distribution.

1. The federal government must subsidize Pfizer and Moderna in exchange for them to publish the formula for the vaccines. The two companies have a collective market cap of $251 billion. A deal to cover lost profits and reward the efforts of both companies shouldn’t exceed more than $100 billion. And while $100 billion seems like a lot, it is a fraction of what we have already spent fighting this virus.
2. Enable other companies who are capable of producing the vaccine to make shipment deals to hospitals and cities. And then it is just a matter of getting people vaccinated, something that is largely a local effort.

Interference in the free market is not something you want in normal times, and regular business. But these are not normal times, and regular business means things like fast food, buying cars or a new phone, not life saving medicine in a pandemic. The reason younger generations are becoming so resistant to capitalism is because of what we are seeing now. Capitalism, in its unadulterated form, has issues that emerge from a lack of regulation.

There’s a reason muckrakers emerged toward the end of the 19th century. Governments weren’t regulating businesses, until journalists brought to the forefront of the public what was really going on. The regulation that resulted is the reason there isn’t sawdust in your sausages, or that child labor was banned, because they were moral tragedies.

Letting people die for profits is, if anything, an even bigger moral tragedy.