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The problem was not simply that Britain hadn’t sold any vaccines, nor that it had failed to donate any vaccines, as bad as that was. There was a deeper problem. We’d effectively put Big Pharma bosses in charge of our vaccine rollout, even though those medicines had been developed with public money. Those bosses were now refusing to share the vaccine know-how with the many countries which would have been capable of producing more.Â
In our global economy, corporate profits were shown to be more important than millions of people’s lives, more important than ending a world-changing pandemic as quickly as possible.Â
The more I looked into it, the more I came to understand why Big Pharma repeatedly put profits before lives. From the spread of HIV in southern Africa, to the opioid crisis in the US, to the failure to invest in desperately needed new antibiotics, the way we make medicines is utterly broken. It’s the economic model of the industry – the ‘pharmanomics’ – that needs changing.
But I didn’t want this book to be a story of despair, far from it. I wanted to point the way to a very different sort of medical research and development, which could meet the need of humanity in the twenty first century. And I wanted to celebrate the activism I saw during the pandemic and the inspirational movements that are bringing a better, fairer medicine system closer.Â
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I am hopeful. When I look around the world – from South Africa to Brazil, from Colombia to the USA, it feels like we have a massive, possibly unprecedented opportunity for real change, to nurture the shoots of a better model which are already growing.Â
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By telling the story of the movement against Big Pharma, I hope this book will contribute a little to the change we need. And I hope it will give you the information and the inspiration you need to keep fighting for it.  Â
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Pharmanomics is out on 3 October, and we’ve secured a special offer for Global Justice Now supporters.
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