[ The real outrage isn’t that people can get vaccinated, but
that due to pharmaceutical greed and government inaction, billions of
people can’t.]
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THE RIGHT HAS FLIPPED THE REAL VACCINE SCANDAL ON ITS HEAD  
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Branco Marcetic
July 12, 2023
Jacobin
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_ The real outrage isn’t that people can get vaccinated, but that
due to pharmaceutical greed and government inaction, billions of
people can’t. _

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Quick: What’s the biggest debate happening right now that touches on
pharmaceutical greed and the US health care system?

There’s a good chance you said vaccines, their efficacy, and whether
we should be made to get them. For the past few years, the blue-red
food fight that for many constitutes US politics has often been
centered on vaccines and whether or not one “believes” enough in
science to voluntarily get the jab — or to support mandates for
others. Look at the way that Florida governor Ron DeSantis catapulted
to prominence in Republican politics by rolling back
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“medical authoritarianism” of pandemic mandates while surrounding
himself with anti-vaccine cranks.

Meanwhile, President Joe Biden’s stiffest primary challenge has so
far come from a longtime anti-vaccine Kennedy family member
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points to the past few years of immunization policy as a nefarious
product of pharmaceutical greed. The past few weeks alone have been
dominated, ironically, by debate about the effectiveness of debate in
responding to anti-vaccine commentators who share Kennedy’s
sentiments, who have grown in prominence in recent years.

The core argument of these figures can be summarized like this: the
danger of the coronavirus pandemic was overblown, and the vaccines
that were produced were ineffective to combat it, if not outright
dangerous for the alleged secondary side effects they carry. The panic
over COVID-19, the rapid development of the vaccine and massive
government purchases of doses to combat it, the society-wide push to
get vaccinated, the implementation of mandates to nudge those less
willing into doing so — all of it was driven by Big Pharma as part
of its insatiable hunger for profits, working with notoriously corrupt
government institutions.

Stop and think about it for a few seconds, and you’ll marvel at just
how remarkable a sleight of hand this has been. You don’t have to
think back very far to recall that the worst, most greed-inflected
COVID-related injustice wasn’t the fact that people got vaccinated
against a deadly illness, but that billions
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couldn’t.

For nearly two years, wealthy Western governments, including that of
the United States, dragged their feet
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approving a patent waiver that would have allowed cheaper, generic
versions of vaccines, therapeutics, and tests to be developed locally
by countries that couldn’t afford to buy up enormous quantities of
the stuff. Big Pharma companies fought fiercely
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the waiver, preferring that fewer of the world’s people get
immunized against or cheaply treated for the virus if it meant bigger
profits for themselves. They ultimately got their way, with a
substantially watered-down
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of the waiver approved last year.

In this effort, pharmaceutical companies were joined by billionaire
Bill Gates, cast by the Right as one of the big villains of the
pandemic. Gates does deserve this label — but not, as Kennedy and
others might argue
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because he foisted vaccines on the rest of us, but because he did the
opposite. The influential and absurdly wealthy Gates was one of
the leading voices
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waiver even as the virus spread and wreaked havoc through the poorest
parts of the world. Once again, it would be surprising if financial
incentives didn’t play at least some role, since Gates’s wealth is
partly based on
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intellectual property (IP) protections.

But this goes beyond IP. Until recently, the federal government’s
mass buy-up of COVID vaccines, tests, and treatments had been core to
US efforts to combat the pandemic, guaranteeing that cost and
insurance status weren’t barriers for anyone to get medical help for
an infection, and ensuring that American society’s most vulnerable
— and those who might be hit hardest by the virus — would be
protected.

Then late last year, just as today’s right-wing vaccine skeptics
demanded, the Biden administration announced that it would privatiz
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US pandemic response
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As a result, the price of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines shot up more
than fourfold, a devastating financial barrier for the millions of
uninsured Americans whose ranks are set to swell by fifteen million by
the end of this month, thanks to the COVID emergency declaration’s
end — spelling the end of Medicaid expansion, another result of
Biden bowing to COVID skeptics. (The end of that emergency also meant
the end of a federal provision letting state Medicaid programs cover
vaccine-related costs). We’ve already gotten a taste of the chaos
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this pandemic privatization has meant for the uninsured, who have been
unwittingly charged hundreds, even thousands of dollars for tests.

Though the administration put forth a $1.1 billion bridge program
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vaccines, its modest size coupled with the failure
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create a more permanent vaccine safety-net program for adults means
that it won’t be enough to cover the shortfall. The insured,
meanwhile, can look forward
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higher premiums as a result, or even paying this full, exorbitant
cost if they go out of network
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It’s astounding that in the face of all this, the Right — long
hostile to a publicly funded and controlled health system — has
somehow been able to make the idea of the corporate health care system
conspiring with politicians to make it harder to get treatment for the
pandemic a _virtue_, instead of the scandal that it is.

The pandemic should’ve provided a leg up to efforts to expand the
United States’s patchy public health system. Americans were instead
given a brief taste of what a sensical health care system could look
like, only to have it ripped away for the sake of private profits and
government penny-pinching that’s never applied to the Pentagon —
and for billions of others around the world who were denied the most
basic bit of COVID protection in the form of vaccines, thanks to
pharmaceutical greed.

That’s the real scandal of the pandemic. And the fact that the
public health debate has lurched like it has to the preferred terrain
of vaccine skeptics more or less ensures for the foreseeable future
that we’ll only be talking about what other forms of health care big
business and neoliberal politicians can deprive you of next.

_Branko Marcetic is a Jacobin staff writer and the author
of Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden. He lives in
Chicago, Illinois._

* vaccinations
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* Scandal
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* COVID-19
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* THE RIGHT
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