How Profit Kills

Do you ever wonder why the “arsenal of democracy”—which co-invented (with Germany) the astoundingly effective mRNA vaccines—can barely produce enough vaccines for its own people, while viral variants like omicron, with more likely to come, require vaccinating the whole world at “warp speed”? Do you ever wonder why the wealthiest, most powerful nation on Earth can’t produce enough Covid tests for its people after almost two years of pandemic?

Maybe a sports analogy can help us understand. Coaches often point out that the body follows the head. But what’s the head of a whole nation? Is it a leader like one of the Joes, Manchin or Biden? Or is it our moral principles?

If the latter, we have a problem. Some time in the late postwar period, our national moral compass got stuck on private profit. That became our chief national value. Today our compass is still stuck there.

It’s stuck notwithstanding the Business Roundtable’s tentative admission—just before the pandemic struck—that maybe there’s more to life than profit. If you can identify any important practical consequence of that alleged moral epiphany, please let me know.

Of course we never formally proclaimed profit as our moral lodestar. It just happened.

Those who made it so are hardly stupid. They are so smart they got rich. And they dragged their lawyers, lobbyists, PR operatives, and the pols who shill for them, if not to the heights of riches, at least well out of the middle class. They all knew and know the drill.

Openly worshiping Mammon would have contradicted almost every organized religion. It certainly would have undermined Christianity, which too many of us want to make our official religion now. So we had to do it subtly, under the aegis of economics.

But look at what we actually do as a nation, rather than what we say. Look at vaccines, for example. Don’t look at development, least of all of the mRNA vaccines, which emerged from decades of government-funded genomic research.

Development isn’t where the really big money is, either in expense or in profit. The big bucks are in rollout and supply, where shots go into arms, pills get distributed, and people’s health and lives get saved.

That’s where profit rules and government is hog-tied.

Don’t take my word for it. Read a recent in-depth study published by the New York Times. For thirty years, the report reveals, our government tried every tack toward boosting production of vaccines. As the report put it, “Three times over the past three decades, presidential administrations explored plans for a vaccine overhaul like the one President Biden is now considering, only to be thwarted by pharmaceutical lobbying, political jockeying and cost concerns[.]”

Our government tried to produce vaccines when private business wouldn’t step in for fear of uncertain markets. It tried to set up partnerships with private businesses. It tried to found non-profit businesses to work with private businesses.

In every case private businesses used their lobbying power, combined with dilatory but ultimately unsuccessful negotiation, to kill the government’s initiatives. They killed plans for production by government directly, fearing the creation of a powerful competitor. They wouldn’t work with government producers or even with non-profits, fearing getting sucked into unprofitable enterprises. As the report summarizes:

“[W]hile the government has tried to enlist major pharmaceutical companies, they have largely been reluctant to divert resources from commercial products. At the same time, they have stood in the way when the government has proposed its own factory, fearing a taxpayer-backed competitor.”

The recent bottlenecks in producing the mRNA vaccines and even conventional vaccines against Covid-19 were just the latest episodes in a dismal story. Earlier debacles involved vaccines against anthrax and botulinum toxins.

As our troops went to war in Gulf I, our intelligence suggested that the Iraqis had both toxins and would use them against our troops. But failed government efforts to mass-produce vaccines for our troops left us with only enough for “troops considered at the highest risk.” Why? “The [pharmaceutical] companies had concerns about legal liability and did not want to invest in switching production lines if the government couldn’t promise large purchases after the crisis.”

In drawing these conclusions, the two reporters reviewed “thousands of pages of records—among them files from presidential and military archives, previously undisclosed government reports, industry correspondence and business plans.” They interviewed over 30 leaders from “five presidential administrations, corporate executives and industry consultants.”

One of the two reporters was Sheryl Gay Stolberg, whom I once roundly criticized on this blog for passing off right-wing name-calling as journalism. Did she have an epiphany? I don’t know. Reporters aren’t supposed to have epiphanies. They’re just supposed to report the news.

But even if Stolberg had an epiphany, it apparently wasn’t total. The report’s headline accuses the government of “30 Years of . . . Culpability,” while the report itself details case after case in which private businesses, in their steadfast pursuit of profit, stymied the government’s reasonable initiatives for producing vaccines in quantity and quickly. That kind of cognitive dissonance between a report’s headline and its substance is worthy of Fox.

Yet what the report’s substance shows is crystal clear. We don’t have enough vaccines to fend off the Covid-19 pandemic worldwide because private businesses didn’t want to do the work without an assurance of profit. And they didn’t want to assist government in doing the work either, for fear of competition in pursuing future profit opportunities.

In other words, Big Pharma played the classic Dog in the Manger—a worthy metaphor at Christmas time! It didn’t want to make the vaccines itself—although it had and has the greatest production expertise—because there wasn’t enough profit in it, or because the profit wasn’t sure enough. But Big Pharma didn’t want the government to make them either, for fear of losing unknown future profits to a strong competitor.

I hope all the people who will suffer for want of vaccines, and the families of those who will die, will remember who and what are responsible. Their suffering and death will surely be wages of the sins of greed and selfishness, as conceived in Christianity and most every other major religion. That’s something worth considering this Christmas, while bemoaning the vanishing gift-supply backlog.

When private business won’t act—for whatever reason—there is only one practical resort: to government’s power and purse. “The people” aren’t capable of producing sophisticated vaccines in backyard or basement laboratories. In his “Great Leap Forward,” Mao tried that with steel making, in improvised furnaces in backyards and on farms. The result was catastrophic failure and widespread famine.

Once upon a time, when we had a more flexible moral compass, we did much better in making big public projects work when private industry wouldn’t or couldn’t. When our enemy had a human (Nazi) face, we took the abstruse theory of nuclear fission from bare demonstration to nuclear weapons in less than two years and eight months. Our government financed and ran the whole project, in wartime secrecy, and private industry contributed what it could.

As a people, we are fully capable of doing something similar in fighting a changeling virus. But we can succeed only if we don’t let a relentless quest for private profit get in the way. If we do, we will be condemning the unvaccinated to suffering and death, at home and abroad, as surely as did the (mostly private) nursing homes that let infected and unvaccinated visitors and care providers inside their doors with few or no restraints. And the virus, which has changed forms multiple times already, won’t wait for our moral epiphany to change again.

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