What’s behind global covid inequalities? Vaccine corporatism
During the earliest months of the pandemic, it was customary for world leaders to invoke the spirit of wartime solidarity. The sentiment was, in principle, the right one — not only because a global crisis demands coordination on a massive scale but also because of the direct precedent found in how governments approached public health during the bleakest days of the 1940s.
Through its War Production Board, the United States cast aside restrictions surrounding intellectual property rights and, officials and researchers worked tirelessly to share information. Guided by a singular objective to maximize the production of lifesaving drugs and medicines, the WPB compelled pharmaceutical companies to share their recipes — notably forcing Pfizer to give up a special fermentation method for making penicillin, a move that yielded a more than tenfold increase in its production over the following two years.… Seguir leyendo »