I'm gonna take risks
Because it's a great big world out there
Hello Readers,
I keep telling people this summer will bring a great respite from Pandemic Living. But look, I don’t know any more than the next yokel. Right now, there’s a horrific health crisis in India, with bodies being burned in improvised pyres. Things have not gone well in Brazil, either. Or, for that matter, in Michigan.
There’s a rapidly developing discussion that asserts the radical idea that vaccines should not be hoarded by the rich countries, and should not be protected by the intellectual property laws that keep them under the control of big drug companies. I’ve had a hard time getting my head around the way patents work in all this. You mean to say that the federal government sinks all kinds of money into drug research, and then showers Big Pharma with billions of dollars to support the development and testing of these drugs, and then in the end a few big corporations own all the knowledge?
My friend Ann Neumann explained it, and wrote about better ways of thinking about intellectual property in a recent piece for The Baffler web called “Who Owns Vaccines?”
Removing IP protections for Covid vaccines would allow the manufacture and distribution of vaccines in low- and middle-income countries, making distribution more equitable. “It should have been done a year ago,” [Arthur] Caplan told me of dropping IP laws, because “it put people at risk of death and in harm’s way for no reason.”
One of the most important parts of this story has to do with the intervention of Bill Gates to prevent an open-source vaccine from being made available around the world. Ann explains how that went down, and if you really want to read all the sordid details, the journalist Alexander Zaitchik went deep into it for The New Republic. In recent years, Gates has been lovingly profiled as a great crusader for global health. But this man has an unshakeable devotion to intellectual property—that is, to the laws that allowed Microsoft to grow as a virtual monopoly and to make him into a billionaire. Economist Dean Baker is also very good in explaining how all this works. “It's too bad we can't get some billionaire type interested in public health,” he tweeted sarcastically a while ago. “They could pick up the tab on something like this and then make it available as a cheap generic. It would have a huge impact.” But Gates likes the system the way it is, and tends to get red in the face if you challenge him on IP.
The big business of pain
Anyway, the drug companies are feeling the heat—and have deployed an army of lobbyists to Washington, D.C., to nip this talk about removing patent protection in the bud. All of this makes it a good time to think again about the way “moral calculations” have no place in the world of Big Pharma. There’s a new book out, Empire of Pain, about the Sackler family, detailing the ways they created the opioid disaster with their aggressive promotion of OxyContin. Written by Patrick Radden Keefe, the story “will make your blood boil,” according to the review in the Sunday NYT.
Some 500,000 Americans have died from opioid-related overdoses since 1999, and millions more have become hopelessly addicted. Not all of this wreckage can be laid at the feet of the Sacklers, but a lot of it can. By aggressively promoting OxyContin, their company, Purdue Pharma, ushered in a new paradigm under which doctors began routinely prescribing the potent and dangerously addictive narcotics. In the process, the Sacklers became fabulously rich, reaping, according to one expert’s court testimony, some $13 billion.
Well, there’s the genius of the “free enterprise” system at work.
And on a personal note…
I have come to the point now of being half-vaxxed. Inevitably, our minds turn to how things will change when we’re ready to “put ourselves out there.” This little bit by Chicago comedian Vinny Thomas captures almost exactly the way I’ve been feeling about it.
Spam a lot?
I have one of my own email addresses on the list to receive this “news” letter. A while ago, I noticed one landed in my spam folder. I had spammed myself. I want to tell you to check your spam folder if you are not seeing this, but if you are not seeing this you will not be alerted to this problem. Hmmm… Well, the full archive lives here. Anyway, this is a “non-monetized” occasional newsletter, which I send out at least once a month. I started with about 50 people and now it’s about 100. If you want to pass it around, others can easily subscribe. If you get too much email, as most of us do, you can unsubscribe, no offense taken. Or if you’d like it to go to a different email address, you can let me know.
We’ve got a new print issue of The Baffler coming out soon, so don’t be surprised if I return shortly to talk that up! I also want to return to the subjects of bittersweet vines, native plants, and the latest happenings in the world of professional bowling. And because today’s thoughts about Big Pharma are kind of a downer, let us close out with a nice portrait of Bertie the Terrier, on a recent foggy morning.
