I was impressed how fast the UK and the US were vaccinating their population. How were they doing it, after they had been so incompetent during the rest of the pandemic?
Simple enough. Restrictions on vaccine exports.
India delays big exports of AstraZeneca shot, including to COVAX, as infections surge
And then there’s this:
The map of countries which blocked the proposal of right to manufacture and import affordable versions of the Covid-19 vaccines. The proposal was led by India and South Africa. https://t.co/sl5grZsPiQ #maps pic.twitter.com/0c3cnzJwfG
— Wondering Maps (@wonderingmaps) March 13, 2021
(Spare me the self-serving arguments that breaking the patents wouldn’t have helped because it takes too much time to ramp up production. However long it takes, the sooner your open up the IP, the faster it happens.)
And we could make it happen faster:
But the global capacity for producing vaccines is about a third of what is needed, says Ellen t’Hoen, an expert in medicines policy and intellectual property law.
….
To make a vaccine you not only need to have the right to produce the actual substance they are composed of (which is protected by patents), you also need to have the knowledge about how to make them because the technology can be complex.
The WHO does not have the authority to sidestep patents – but it is trying to bring countries together to find a way to bolster vaccine supplies.
The discussions include using provisions in international law to get around patents and helping countries to have the technical ability to make them.
Rich countries use IP law to keep poor countries poor, and to kill and impoverish their citizens to make even larger profits.
And, of course, if you’re stupid enough to believe neoliberal bullshit about how your countries will be OK and don’t take steps even though you have manufacturing capacity, (Europe), well, your citizens die. The EU is now restricting imports to the UK. I wonder how many Europeans will die because of not having those 10 million doses?
“I mention specifically the U.K.,” said EU Commission Vice-President Valdis Dombrovskis. Since the end of January, “some 10 million doses have been exported from the EU to the U.K. and zero doses have been exported from U.K. to the EU.”
OK. I have said this for years and years but I’m going to say it again now that it is being illustrated brutally: if you can’t make it yourself, you can’t be sure you’ll have it when you need it, since countries that can make it will tend to prioritize themselves.
You must make and grow everything essential to your country domestically if you can. Any international laws that forbid you from doing so are illegitimate. They may exist; they are not Just. This doesn’t mean completely breaking patent law (though it needs to be much less draconian and a lot less long), it does mean, at the least, writing in mandatory licensing provisions at reasonable prices.
A lot of people are going to die who didn’t need to because neoliberal “free trade” orthodoxy said you didn’t need to be able to both design and make vaccines in your own country: the “market” would supply you.
Eventually.
This isn’t just about behaviour now. It is about behaviour that has been encoded into law and trade practice over decades.
Don’t offshore anything that matters. If your citizens have to pay 5% or 10% more, slap on tariffs.
To not do so, if you think the welfare of your citizens is your duty, is treason.
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nobody
The EU should impose a total trade embargo, including food exports, on the UK. It would be a completely fair and justified response to starve them out in retaliation both for Brexit and for the UK helping itself to the EU’s vaccine supplies.
Nobody takes EU foreign policy seriously because it doesn’t have the stomach to hurt its enemies. Destroying the British economy would change this very quickly.
Joan
I am in a small European country that in general just tries to keep its head down and go unnoticed. I got an email from the vaccine initiative last week announcing they had fully vaccinated the nursing home population and everyone 90 and over. At this rate, it’ll be 2022 before they get to me! I know only one person who’s gotten the first stab, who isn’t a doctor. One person.
I agree with Ian 100%, and his point is what I tend to push: re-localize the economy. I’ll leave it there since I’ve said it before!
Ché Pasa
Oh, I think it’s happening, that re-localization. Essentially, there’s no alternative.
Funny thing, though. The dead from Covid are largely piling up and filling the cemeteries in the US and Europe and… hm… Brazil. Where all the Markets are allowed to rule. Vaccines may be effective, but look who isn’t getting them here and abroad, even with Markets. Look at how effective/ineffective other actions can be in the absence of vaccines. And look who’s coming up with their own vaccines if they can.
The policy of our Market rulers, of course, is that some proportion of every population must die. From this or some other cause, and so it will be, world without end. Mitigation must be strictly controlled, not the virus.
It doesn’t have to be this way, but that’s the way it is.
edmondo
We make bombs. And we always seem to have plenty of them. We are the Evil Empire.
Adam Eran
Worth remembering: Finland’s scientists produced a patent-free vaccine, but the country refused to fund the final trials. See https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/02/finland-vaccine-covid-patent-ip
Hugh
The EU was crummy in its initial response to covid. Some of its individual states did better because they could control their response and had national healthcare systems to fall back on. But when it came to vaccination, the EU again fell down. If the EU could solve its problems by some nameless committee somewhere writing a memo, it would do fine, but when it comes to planning and executing, scrambling to produce the vaccines, lay out the money, sign the contracts, a lot more time and energy are spent on recriminations and CYA than actually getting the job done.
Overall, I agree with Ian. In the past, I have tried to get this point across using the example of underwear. Seems silly, right? But what happens when you close your plants and send all your underwear production to China? and China gets pissed. Whether microchips, PPE, underwear, or a thousand other things we need to keep some part of our manufacture, with ability to expand it, local. Many countries can’t do this, but some like the US have no excuses. They can and must.
Purple Library Guy
There’s also the geopolitical issue: The more globalized your economy is, the more not only producers abroad but also anyone who controls international banks has you by the short and curlies. So just as a random example, if the United States, say, controls the Swift international payments system, and you need to use it to pay for your imports, which you have to do because half the stuff you need isn’t produced at home, then the United States can dictate what you do–and if you refuse their “offers you can’t refuse”, they’ll sanction you until your economy dies a horrible death and there’s mass starvation.
Like they’re doing right now to, for instance, Venezuela and Syria and Iran. Those countries are sure as hell getting a lesson in why you should produce what you need at home. But there are dozens of less obvious cases where countries might have wanted to do some policy to help their own people but blinked because they didn’t want that to happen to them.
S Brennan
I alongside the vast majority of Americans have been saying this for close to 35 years and until Trump…the subject was not even given lip service during the Clinton/Bush/Obama years unless to dismiss the concern. Again, in my youth, balanced trade was a part of the daily lexicon. Whether Trump was lying or not isn’t the point, he said it out loud where everybody could hear him. The fact that he has been saying the same thing for at least thirty years that I personally know of won’t matter to his critics…facts never do. What made Trump dangerous to the elite/bourgeoisie was that the concern was expressed at all, as their salaries depend on selling the country quietly down the river.
The fact of the matter is, Nationalism is NOT a bad word, Mercantilism is NOT a bad policy, Tariffs are NOT a bad mechanism. Except for capital interests, excess manufacturing capacity is a safety net…should everything not go “exactly as planned”. Or as we used to say at Boeing, “just in time” means “it’s just not there”.
Special Prize for the first idiot that brings up Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act without knowing the actual GDP/World-Trade contraction/expansion numbers in the surrounding decade and the MAXIMUM POSSIBLE contribution to the great depression. Hint, they don’t teach this in the Econ 101 indoctrination, because the MAXIMUM contribution is minuscule, a third order term in the great depression. Your economics instructor lied. All economics “people” tell this great lie, but hey, this is the “profession” that gives itself phony “Nobel Prizes”…talk about a profession utterly lacking in ethics.
I find it amusing to see Ché, our resident revolutionary* up above urging passivity..again. Ché is a guy who vehemently opposes a return to FDRism in favor of wiping the slate clean in a cataclysmic revolution [that will never happen] to achieve some private utopian vision in his head [that will never be implemented]. But when the rubber hits the road…Ché has always tried to talk folks here into voting for Shiton Astik[D] because “essentially, there’s no alternative”. Talk about a bait & switch salesman. I can see it now Ché, like the Cheshire Cat sitting on his fat portfolio, wearing a “Change you can believe in” T-shirt.
Willy
The fact that he has been saying the same thing for at least thirty years that I personally know of won’t matter to his critics…facts never do.
The Jimmy Dore Plan of denying blue votes when they all they ever do is “boo hoo to yoo”, was a good one. But Dore ignored the most important part, knowing the basic character of the alternative candidate. Whoops.
Trump could’ve easily spoken of things which Once Made America Great, things like well, what FDR used to do. Instead, he made his conservative base even more an enemy of anything “left”.
He was an even worse grifter than Reagan was, of “big tent” and “FDR admirer” bullshitter fame.
If ther is one positive about Trump, he did know his audience. They think him on a mission from God. And they got them talking about fair trade again, as well as the benefits of nationalism. Unfortunately, since they cannot think nearly as well as they can talk, and he alienated the left, there’s little meaningful discussion going on. Only the namecalling in which he excelled. On that note, I’d like to introduce you to S Brennan. S Brennan everybody!
Hugh
Look at all the millions of jobs Trump returned from China, and seems like he was invoking the the Defense Production Act every other day. Oh, wait, that’s what he said he would do, not what he did.
Willy
Speaking of fools…
“Whether Trump was lying or not isn’t the point, he said it out loud where everybody could hear him.”
As a far more learned student of character than Dore appears to be, I had wishfully predicted that Trump would (at worst) be the ultimate poster child for somebody who promises much but delivers little. In colloquial English this is commonly known as “a con artist”. But at least we’d be talking about what left and right has in common and how we might get somebody who can actually competently deliver.
Instead, I learned that many people are highly-rationalizing buffoons, easily suckered. Even if Trump did actually shoot somebody on 5th Avenue, with lots of Youtube videos documenting, his buffoons would call it a deep fake or blame antifa or whatever the hell would gain the most traction. It’s almost like some people were born to be cultists, or suckers if that’s your grift.
Would somebody be so kind as to point me to a conservative resource which speaks positively about FDR? Almost every “thinking” conservative I know of despises FDR. Yet when I ask them why, they’ll refer me to a conservative resource they’ve pulled straight out of their ass, after calling me all sorts of names of course. Often, when I research the funding of said resource, it leads straight to plutocrats.
It’s almost like these conservatives are impulsively rationalizing. My plan, as opposed to Dore’s, is to push these brainwashed conservatives into circling the drain ever faster, to the point where their rage towards “socialism” or “libtards” produces so many odd tics of ever increasing bizarreness that they wind up in Youtube videos.
Bridget
The fact that he has been saying the same thing for at least thirty years that I personally know of won’t matter to his critics…facts never do.
No one in their right mind has been following closely or taking seriously what Donald Trump has been saying for thirty years, excepting perhaps for its entertainment value.
What made Trump dangerous to the elite/bourgeoisie was that the concern was expressed at all, as their salaries depend on selling the country quietly down the river.
Trump was never dangerous to the elite.
As I remarked to bruce wilder a few days ago: you are sorely lacking in both basic reasoning as well as the broader sensate-intuitive faculties. With you in particular, it’s often hard to imagine you as a real person. Your reasoning and intuitive faculties – or lack thereof, as the case may be – lead you to arrive at conclusions that could just as well have emanated from a poorly programmed bot.
All the bots who admire Donald Trump and waste an iota of energy defending him are every bit as credulous as all the bots who do the same thing in the interest of their beloved Obama. They’re all fools of a feather who could quite easily flock together if they decided to drop their inane political commentary and rally round the naivete that is so sacred to their exceedingly narrow comprehensions.
Bridget
I know a man who runs a landscaping business near Atlantic City, where Trump used to be quite prominent – when it was in his interest to be quite prominent there. The man is a Trump supporter and he goes on and on about how bad the elites of both parties screw everyone. I agree, and I ask him why he thinks Trump would be better, given that Trump has repeatedly screwed over workers and those around him who’ve helped him build and acquire his “wealth.” The man said Trump hasn’t broken any laws. I ask him if he would treat his workers the same way. He hems and haws as he attempts to arrive at an even marginally reasonable answer. There isn’t one, so inevitably the subject is changed.
Donald Trump knows heading into his ventures that legally he’ll be able to screw over many of the people and small businesses who help him acquire wealth, power, and prestige. He knows that and he does it anyway. That’s what he does. That’s who he is.
Donald Trump a fraud and a liar just like the fraud and liars he’s calling out – in his own interest, not yours, mine, or the honest man running his landscaping business, still barely getting by – with or without TPP.
Mr Jones
No one in their right mind has been following closely or taking seriously what Donald Trump has been saying for thirty years, excepting perhaps for its entertainment value.
S Brennan cares more about what Trump said thirty years ago than Trump himself does. Trump probably only vaguely remembers uttering things – if he remembers them at all – that S Brennan holds inviolate.
Trump never seriously or aggressively fought for the noble ideas he allegedly holds sacrosanct, even when he was in the preeminent position to do so.
Willy
I once worked for a company which gave shop tours to their design staff. The idea was to get the design staff to be more aware of stuff like producibility and shop worker ergonomics.
I remember “Teddy”. He was huge, over 300 pounds, and sat on a pillowed stool all day deburring small parts. My tour leader said: “This is Teddy. Show us what you do.” Teddy grabbed a part from the bucket to his right, ran it under a spinning wire brush, dropped it into a bucket on his left, then looked up at us blankly. I noticed that Teddy had a mountain of buckets to his right. A very long day awaited Teddy. But at least he belonged to a union and was making a living wage.
I think the only job worse than Teddy’s would be sitting inside a cubicle at a plutocratic-funded troll farm, going through buckets of website commentary spewing out the same old ad hominem. Day after stinking day. Be enough to make me want to put a gun to my head.
As for offshoring, I was always one of the “having them make our rubber dog shit or even our transistor radios is probably okay” guys. But giving Huawei every tool it needs to overtake Apple or Cisco seem impossibly stupid.
Lucy
Donald Trump knows heading into his ventures that legally he’ll be able to screw over many of the people and small businesses who help him acquire wealth, power, and prestige. He knows that and he does it anyway.
And of course, the ventures Trump is most attracted to are entertainment-related or otherwise non-productive. He’s never been involved with anything that could be said to be even remotely usefully productive for society. He caters to rich golfers and a certain class of real estate cretin. And casino goers. The first two already have the laws written almost entirely in their favor, but it’s never enough. They crave more and get off on coming up with devious ways to get it, at the expense of the casino goers, who are just trying to relax and forget all the misery they’ve been subjected to their entire lives* due to deals struck on Trump and his ilk’s beloved golf courses.
George Carlin had some insightful thoughts on golf courses and the people who inhabit them.
*leaving aside the all-too-common well-to-do casino goer, for the sake of argument
It’s funny that Trump is all about easy money yet he’s adored and defended by many who are actually hard-working themselves. This isn’t unique to Trump and his adherents but – as with seemingly everything Trumpian – it manifests differently.
frankie barbells
Trump never seriously or aggressively fought for the noble ideas he allegedly holds sacrosanct, even when he was in the preeminent position to do so.
Trump acolytes don’t comprehend this any more than Obama acolytes do. Both really are birds of a feather. Except they don’t flock together. Except to argue with one another.
And Trump and Obama continue pursuing their own demented ends.
Bridget
If you invest energy in something or someone to an even somewhat serious degree, you have to back it up – to yourself first and foremost. It was sad watching people get behind someone who’s entire essence exudes connivance, and it’s sadder still watching the same people defend him after the fact.
That said, it’s also perfectly understandable. What people are really defending is their own decision to back Trump in the first place. They have to do this for their own psyche, simply by virtue of the fact that if Trump was at all serious about the things he ran on then he was obviously absolutely spineless and utterly incompetent when he found himself in a position to fight for them. It’s hard to admit that one expended precious time and energy on a spineless self-promoter.
Of course, if Trump wasn’t serious, then his supporters were foolish and every bit as harebrained as the man they voted for.
This simple truism holds to one degree or another for all politician-voter relationships. In the case of Trump it’s amplified to a deranged degree because of the increasingly pressing need for a new politics and, I guess, because of Trumps’ own uniquely bizarre persona and its effects on people.
metamars
“Special Prize for the first idiot that brings up Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act without knowing the actual GDP/World-Trade contraction/expansion numbers in the surrounding decade and the MAXIMUM POSSIBLE contribution to the great depression. Hint, they don’t teach this in the Econ 101 indoctrination, because the MAXIMUM contribution is minuscule, a third order term in the great depression. Your economics instructor lied. All economics “people” tell this great lie, but hey, this is the “profession” that gives itself phony “Nobel Prizes”…talk about a profession utterly lacking in ethics.”
I don’t usually comment on economics, because I don’t know much about it. But this is the impression I have, based on a conversation with 2 close relatives, both with 2 ivy league degrees. (One has an MBA). I was informed that a Nobel prize winner who taught one of their courses explained free trade was a blameless wonder. I asked whether the cheaper price of imports mattered to somebody who loses their job, and will never find another as the same level of income.
I don’t remember the answer, but I’m sure it didn’t impress me.
I would be interested to know a little more about the rebuttal to blaming the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act for the depression.
Willy
The great Milton Friedman rebutted SMTA claiming its influence on the Depression was minimal. But then, he was always more of a technician than a social scientist, a bit like a robot trying to explain the psychology behind “race-to-the-bottom”.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-01/how-wrong-was-milton-friedman-harvard-team-quantifies-the-ways
Imports/exports as a percentage of GDP is triple today what it was back then. But for me, outsourcing America runs second to allowing the loss of American innovative-competitive superiority. Not only does China have 4x the genius pool as the USA does, but they’re under a lot more control by their own government. I think they’ll be the ones who’ll be inventing the AI robot which takes over the world.
But then I’m no economist. But I do have a cousin who’s a Phd in that and I stayed at her house once
S Brennan
Being censored; Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act mid Jun 1930
https://www.stlouisfed.org/~/media/Publications/Regional-Economist/2019/Fourth-Quarter/lead_fig1.jpg?la=en
metamars
OK, thanks.
FWIW, it’s my impression that the phrase “revolving door” has basically been censored, also, from mainstream media.
Willy
Not about offshoring, but an update on how the Gravel Institute videos counter to Prager U (Wilks Brothers Disinformation U) is going. 200K views a couple weeks ago, now at 1.2M:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNghg1Y-WIc
(Post in mod about how conservative money supply and free trade hero Uncle Milton claimed that the Smoot Hawley TA had minimal impact in causing the GD, and yet, the conservative masses still believe otherwise. Even after Trump.
bruce wilder
Economists do not have any sort of comprehensive explanation for the Great Depression. What ought to be fascinating to anyone interested in dynamics of the economy is treated as boring or of no interest. Keynes’ much touted “general theory” is not coherent. Galbraith wrote a witty, not very insight book about the political culture of the Crash. Friedman wrote a tendentitious narrative that blamed the Fed for bad monetary policy but gave gold an inexplicable pass, but Friedman’s theory of money was in the main wrong. Gold was blamed by others and not without reason. The sad thing economists cannot even manage to gin up a debate. Absurd narratives are floated that blame ideologically convenient boogiemen, but cannot manage the quantities involved. Smoot-Hawley was an early example. Smoot-Hawley made no sense in 1930s America; it was nostalgia for Republican protective tariffs of the 1890s — wildly successful policy by the way. But, international trade hardly mattered to the U.S. and the U.S. was a net exporter across many industries.
Hugh
You had the failure to deal with the human, economic, and political costs of WWI, a decrepit monetary system and the even more decrepit thinking of ruling classes who were simply incapable of dealing with or even accepting that the world had changed. You had the repeated and cascading effects of doing nothing or choosing the worst possible responses. A lot of echoes with our own times.
The Great Depression did not do away with all this outmoded thinking. A fair amount of socialism and Keynesianism got the US out of depression by 1936. But once that was done, FDR pulled back on the fiscal stimulus and the country went back into depression for another 3 plus years.
Willoweed
A patent is a government created and enforced a monopoly. It is the same as the Soviet Government mandating what is produced and who can produce it. It’s is the opposite of a market. From the looks of it the capitalists never supported markets or opposed government involvement. They supported the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.
Mark Pontin
Ian wrote: ‘Spare me the self-serving arguments that breaking the patents wouldn’t have helped because it takes too much time to ramp up production. However long it takes, the sooner your open up the IP, the faster it happens.’
Back in the real world, Ian, the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine IP is ALREADY AVAILABLE — with the backing of the UK government, which helped underwrite it — at cost price to be licensed for manufacture in any country where it’s required.
As for the mRNA vaccines, you’re wrong. The underlying technology there isn’t fungible in the way you assume.
The big reason the EU Commission isn’t doing outright bans on vaccine exports from the EU into the UK — which it would love to do in order to deflect blame from its own neoliberal incompetence — is that the Pfizer/BionTech vaccine is still dependent on imports of the lipid nanoparticles, which are the secret sauce for the mRNA vaccines, on a manufacturer, Croda, in the UK.
Pfizer/BionTech told the EU Commission last week that they were “heavily dependent” on UK production of those lipid nanoparticles, and they expected Merck and Evonik to take around 8 months to provide alternative supply (End of 2021, Q3/Q4 2021 respectively by press statement).
With this in mind, here’s a thought-experiment: the Bayh-Dole Act allows the US government to require the owner or exclusive licensee of a patent, created with federal funding, to grant a third party a licence to an invention. So the Bayh-Dole Act applies to Moderna’s vaccine, theoretically enabling the Biden administration to act independently and decisively against ‘vaccine apartheid.’
(To be clear: POTUS probably _could_ do all that under Bayh-Dole. But this is still the neoliberal U.S. so it probably won’t happen. I’m not going to defend that.)
But if POTUS did break the patent on Moderna’s mRNA vaccine, it wouldn’t make a difference. The real bottleneck is the immensely complicated microfluidics technology required to engineer — again — the lipid capsules that carry the Moderna mRNA vaccine into a patient’s system.
Okay, you say, break the patent on Moderna’s custom-designed microfluidics technology.
There are related problems there. Firstly, in order to make the microfluidics tech, there’s a chain of equally complicated manufacturing capabilities required for that – the complicated tools to make the complicated tools – and what exists in the world today is already being scaled up as fast as it can for Pfizer-BionTech and Moderna.
I suspect the Bayh-Dole Act would _not_ cover breaking those companies’ patents. Still, for argument’s sake, let’s assume that the Biden administration in an unlikely fit of non-neoliberal humanism breaks the law and dismisses the arguments of the companies that currently own the microfluidics-building technologies.
It still wouldn’t make any difference in any significant time-scale.
Starting from a standing point, with U.S. government-enforced technology transfer, it would still take countries like India and Brazil 9-18 months to achieve the necessary manufacturing capability. By that time, any country with the basic necessary capability could already have Oxford/AZ or Sputnik vaccine manufacturing going.
How do we know this? Because, remember, the frickin’, frackin’ EU will probably need till the end of 2021 — nine months away — to build the necessary capability.
One of the fascinating lessons of the COV19 pandemic has been watching the buffoonish incompetence and arrogance of the neoliberal PMC types in the EU assuming that they can simply sign their contracts and issue their edicts, and the magic of the market will make everything fall into place for them without their paying any attention to the technical specifics of what are, after all, quite novel vaccine technologies.
Indeed, comically, the buffoons spent three months just trying to negotiate a lower price on an AZ vaccine they were already getting at cost.
The primary reason they screwed up is that they were too arrogant to bother to learn anything about the specifics of entirely novel vaccine technologies and consider what it might take to ramp up production facilities.
Don’t be like them.
Ian Welsh
“How do we know this? Because, remember, the frickin’, frackin’ EU will probably need till the end of 2021 — nine months away — to build the necessary capability.”
Very good Mark. Very good. Now, if the patents on manufacture had been broken 3 months ago, manufacturing would be ramped up in 6 to 15 months. AKA. late 2021 to mid 22. If they had been broken 6 months ago… well, you see how this works?
In what world, in any case, is it bad to spread mRNA vaccine manufacturing capacity? Let us assume you are right, that Covid will be eliminated before the knowledge is spread, will it be a bad thing? Is this the last time we will need this capacity? Did you notice the part of the article where I said that many of the mistakes had been made decades ago (with respect to more traditional manufacturing.
I routinely see modeling which shows that Covid will still be active in 2023. I also seem articles on how pandemics (non Covid) are more likely in the future than in the past.
A primary reason people screwed up on Covid is that they didn’t take into account the creation and spread of variants of Covid, more lethal and which spread faster and which vaccines protect less against.
Don’t be like them.
Oh, and the EU’s supply chain NOT being entirely in the EU isn’t a point against the primary point of the essay.
(Note for previous commenters: breaking patents on life saving medicines and breaking patents on the latest Apple gizmo or telecom hardware is not the same thing, although using patents to help keep countries from fully developing, which is part of what we do, is still shit behaviour.)
bruce wilder
With due appreciation for Mark Pontin’s effort to apply some factual dampening to Ian’s free-styling moralizing, let me say that I have to arch my eyebrow at the references in his comment to “at cost price” and “at cost”.
We are talking about technologies which weight sunk-cost development, insurance and up-front fixed cost very heavily, making the variable cost of unit output very small and diminishing with scale. There is no fixed meaning for pricing units “at cost” as long as it is understood that the price must return some of the enormous sunk-costs.
My understanding is that the U.S. government fronted the costs of several development projects and sharply limited the potential tort liabilities attendant on the trials and early distribution of poorly tested vaccines. Those were sweeping measures akin to “breaking IP” but working in the opposite direction in the sense of shoving money at rather than clawing it away from producers and their financiers.
Vaccine development and distribution, especially those employing novel approaches, has been very rapid by any standard and it would be wrong not to acknowledge it. I still share Ian’s cynical skepticism of the economic incentives neoliberalism applies in general to pharma: it looks like a prescription for heroin as an ideal product and I am not sure that we are not getting vaccines shaped to that model (like the flu vaccine, not very effective and requiring renewal, “passports” and other nightmarish properties).
But “at cost” cannot be a credible claim without a lot of definition.
bruce wilder
Hugh: You had the failure to deal with the human, economic, and political costs of WWI, a decrepit monetary system and the even more decrepit thinking of ruling classes who were simply incapable of dealing with or even accepting that the world had changed. You had the repeated and cascading effects of doing nothing or choosing the worst possible responses.
It is striking to me that you chose a fluid narrative that makes no reference to specific factual circumstance or institutional mechanism. Obviously this is a topic worthy of tomes not paragraphs and it would be unfair to simply fault a lack of detail, but not one phrase in your summary can be reconciled to even a small degree with what really happened. It would be hard to find a time in history when wrenching and abrupt change was more freely acknowledged and embraced at every level of political society. The monetary system — the gold exchange system centered on the dollar and Federal Reserve — far from “decrepit” was brand-new and novel. The ruling classes were transformed by the war, completely overthrown in several important states and accepting new men and new styles of living as leading figures in the others.
Many things were tried, politically and economically. The 1920s was extremely dynamic and consequently unstable. In retrospect, the exactly wrong course of policy was chosen in several cases with great consequence, but nowhere was “doing nothing” or reactionary passivity even considered. Statesmen and reformers were acknowledging great problems and reaching for solutions in the 1920s.
Ian Welsh
It was once rather standard, when breaking patents, to simply award the patent-holder a large amount of money. I am quite sure the countries who want the patents broken can afford to cough up the necessary billions. If that was the actual consideration, negotiations as to amount would currently be underway.
In any case, folks are missing the mountains for the molehills: the mountain is the overall thesis, which is partially stated in the title.
But lets keep restricting manufacture of life saving technologies to a few countries, so that next time something like this happens, people can argue “it’s too late now to transfer the tech.”
Trade should, whenever possible, be in goods and services that are not critical and when they are not, international policy should work, when possible (it isn’t always) to end that dependence.
The advantages from “comparative advantage” (a problematic concept in many, many ways) do not outweigh the harm done by critical dependencies. Nor does trade dependency massively reduce the likelihood of war, or WWI would not have happened.
Lot of missing the point going on in comments.
Plague Species
Pointing to history and everything you know about it is useless at this juncture. It’s not the same and I don’t think it even rhymes. These are fully uncharted waters. The Globalists are never going to reverse course and they hold sway. The trend will play out until it is indeed too late. Because this Globalist system is so dependently interconnected, no one can protect themselves from the fallout once it gives out under its own preponderant weight. Especially China. China has a lot further to fall considering its high-flying growth fostered by the West and it will make for a crushing collapse. Nature demands China diminish in population size from 1.4 billion today to 100 million or less in 50 years. Imagine what that looks like. Who would want to live in such a world? The Age of Pandemics combined with Climate Chaos will ensure the end of Globalization as we know it and knew it, but what comes after is not a return to anything with which we are historically familiar.
different clue
@Willy,
Here is what was wrong with letting the foreigner make our rubber dog shit or etch-a-sketches
When Americans made their own rubber dog shit or etch-a-sketches, they were paid an American wage to do so. They took their American-level wages and bought American-priced things or services with those wages, thereby helping other Americans stay employed making bowling balls and aquariums. And so forth and so on and round and round.
Once the rubber dog shit jobs and the etch-a-sketch jobs were outsourced to the foreigner, the disemployed rubber dog shit workers and the disemployed etch-a-sketch workers could maybe get a fast food McJob at fast food McWages, or they could get an unpayed job sleeping under a bridge after they lost their house.
And that’s why I objected just as much to outsourcing the rubber dog shit jobs and the etch-a-sketch jobs just as much as I would object to outsourcing our most precious digital secrets to the foreigner.
(Why do I use the Etch-a-Sketch example rather than the transistor radio example? Because I believe that technically-speaking, Akio Morita invented the “transistor radio” concept in Japan and then went on to invent or develop many other things under his Sony label. If the foreigner has made or is making a better thing, one either buys it from the foreigner or goes without it).
Hugh
I continue to advocate for a government funded national lab with lots of extra capacity concentrating on the production of vaccine, generics, and orphan drugs, This could be extended to PPE, syringes, and whatever else was needed for their production and use. I don’t see why the WHO couldn’t do something similar regionally around the globe.
As for sunk costs, really? Most of the basic research is paid for by government grants and occurs at universities. Drug companies spend more on their advertising than they do on research. And how much research needs to be done to patent the 30th variation of a cephalosporin or SSRI, or the reformulation of a soon to be generic turning it from 3 times a day to once a day?
As for the Great Depression, people forget that for eleven years, from 1921 to 1932, we had exactly one Treasury Secretary, Andrew Mellon –yes, of those Mellons. Old Andy believed in easy money and other than that that government should stay out. He continued to push non-intervention as things got worse and worse. Calling the 1920s dynamic reminds me of people like Timothy Geithner cheerleading “financial innovation,” also very dynamic, which turned a bad housing bubble into an existential financial meltdown in 2008. By the way, the 1920s also had a real estate bubble which went splat! in 1926. I remember a Marx brothers film where Groucho joked about losing his shirt on his Florida investments. And for fans of history, Goldman Sachs ran significant flimflam schemes in the the run-ups to both 1929 and 2008.
Joseph E. Kelleam
As productive capacity dissolves, so does basic electronic/clerical competence. A half hour ago I dialed 411 to get the number of a local grocery. I was automatically connected to a wrong number.
Mark Pontin
Bruce W: ‘We are talking about technologies which weight sunk-cost development, insurance and up-front fixed cost very heavily, making the variable cost of unit output very small and diminishing with scale … the U.S. government fronted the costs of several development projects … Those were sweeping measures akin to “breaking IP” but working in the opposite direction in the sense of shoving money at rather than clawing it away from producers and their financiers.’
And that’s my point.
The U.S., like the U.K., bothered to be cognizant of the technical difficulties of creating the manufacturing facilities to produce _novel vaccine technologies_ at scale ad from scratch, and did what was necessary along the way to facilitate production at scale with various potential producers.
Conversely, the EU Commission not only wasted three months in the middle of last year trying to negotiate AZ down on a novel vaccine it was getting at cost (and far more cheaply than the Pfizer-BionTech) to no great effect —
https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-vaccine-eu/eu-paying-full-price-for-astrazeneca-vaccine-eu-health-official-idUSL8N2K757M
— but it then assumed that it’d done its job by simply signing contracts and didn’t bother to pay continuing attention to the problems inherent in establishing factories for novel vaccine technologies and manufacturing them at scale. And all the COV19 vaccines have had manufacturing shortfalls and delays.
That’s my only point, really. New technologies have granularities and learning curves, but the EU’s PMC types simply — and ignorantly — assumed vaccines are vaccines and they didn’t need to pay attention to any of that.
Mark Pontin
Ian W. wrote: “Let us assume you are right, that Covid will be eliminated before the knowledge is spread, will it be a bad thing?’
I do NOT assume COV19 can be absolutely eliminated. It’s clearly going to remain endemic to some extent. It’s possible via mass immunization to vastly restrict its scope, however, so it’ll become nothing more than a nuisance.
Ian W: “In what world, in any case, is it bad to spread mRNA vaccine manufacturing capacity? … Is this the last time we will need this capacity?”
To answer those questions in reverse order:
No. This is NOT the last time the world will need this capacity. There are lots of worse pathogenic threats out there, anybody with any awareness has been expecting a global pandemic, and with this one, COV19, we’re actually getting off almost laughably lightly.
So it’s not bad to spread mRNA vaccine manufacturing capacity. But in the real world, for example, Russia and China have both struggled to bring to market plausible home-grown jet airliner models that can compete with Airbus’s and Boeing’s (before Boeing self-immolated via neoliberal management). This appears to be in large measure because there are a host of ancillary industries necessary for that which aren’t adequately developed in Russia and China.
An analogous scenario exists currently for the mRNA vaccines, in terms of the lipid nanoparticle components being in turn dependent on a microfluidics-building industry that’s only developed to the necessary level in a very few places.
Would it be better for the human race as a whole if those microfluidics technologies became more widely distributed? Sure, absolutely.
Again, though, in the real world: –
[a] The adenovirus vector vaccines, Oxford-AZ and Russia’s Sputnik V, are far cheaper and more easily manufactured, transported, and stored, and their rollout can be accomplished on a global scale long before the microfluidics capabilities necessary for the mRNA vaccines can be built up globally to accomplish the same with the mRNA vaccines. Furthermore ….
[b] Those holding the IP for the mRNA vaccine-microfluidics know the adenovirus vector vaccines can deliver first COV19-wise. On that basis, therefore, they’re no more likely to give away their technological advantage than the world’s leading microprocessor chip-maker (I’d have once said Intel, but neolib self-immolation has happened there too) is going to give away the designs for its chips.
Because the mRNA vaccines are only the tip of the iceberg. There’s been a revolution in synthetic biology — automated DNA sequencing and synthesis — in the last 15-20 years. The biogenetic sciences and technologies are now standing at about where computers and networking technology stood in the mid-1970s. Just as those technologies dominated the last half-century, the biogenetic technologies are set to dominate the next. But their effect will be far more profound, because these technologies have the power to reframe the terms of life itself.
They will inevitably be a focus of great-power competition. On that basis, I don’t think it’s _realistic_ to expect that any power will necessarily give up a technological advantage. On that basis, also, I think every nation-state that can _should_develop, say, its own independent microfluidics industry on the way to developing mRNA vector capabilities.
Because global biological inequities have the potential to increase quite radically and become quite problematic if, say, people live forty years longer on average than in another, or don’t die of cancer, or are several percentage points more intelligent.
capelin
Ian wrote;
“A primary reason people screwed up on Covid is that they didn’t take into account the creation and spread of variants of Covid, more lethal and which spread faster and which vaccines protect less against.”
Yeah, no one coulda seen that coming. Go to bed or The Varient will get you. Or, Son of Varient.
Really, the primary reason people screw up on Covid is they don’t take _anything into account.
Don’t change _anything of importance that produced the problem.
Buy into the (overblown) fear.
Put all your hopes and salvation into big pharma/big gov.
Long for “Back to Normal”
Learn no lessons.
Repeat.
capelin
Ok, on the specific issue of Covid vaccinations, I think most folks are in an induced stampede to somewhere that’s not gunna be near as helpful, conclusive, or satisfying as they imagined.
But in general, and more on topic, and with an acknowledgement of the myriad complications that would ensue,I totally agree with Ian’s proposition, which when crunched into a pyramid might boil down to this:
“You must make and grow everything essential to your country domestically if you can. Any international laws that forbid you from doing so are illegitimate. They may exist; they are not Just.
I have said this for years and years but I’m going to say it again now that it is being illustrated brutally: if you can’t make it yourself, you can’t be sure you’ll have it when you need it, since countries that can make it will tend to prioritize themselves.
(Spare me the self-serving arguments that breaking the patents wouldn’t have helped because it takes too much time to ramp up production. However long it takes, the sooner you open up the IP, the faster it happens.)”
brucew07@gmail.com
Also, (collective) you must own and control your country.
If some one else, some elite with its interests centered in some other place, owns and controls “your” country, you and yours are likely screwed. If that elite’s interest is making “your” place miserable as a way of making their place comfortable, you and yours are really screwed.
Call it practical solidarity or democratic socialism or a New Deal or do not call it anything, just do it. Or not.
This is the political disease enervating the U.S.: the symbiosis of the globalized billionaire elite with the globalist professional and managerial class.
It is showing up in COVID response in a variety of ways — not just turning to financialized, globalized, networked Pharma for a high-tech solution that may well turn out to be more profitable than truly effective. It is showing up in elite indifference to the welfare of the poor and working classes. It is showing up in incompetence and lack of accountability among the PMC — and in the PMC’s thinly disguised hostility to democracy and free expression.
Joseph E. Kelleam
We don’t even grow our own food anymore. Or should that be “food”?
Case in point (this is display print from the cover of an actual fruit juice cup):
Not bad, eh? But then they contradict themselves in the very next line, followed by an ingredient list:
Yeah, doesn’t all that freshness really assure you?
At this point, it’s clear that not only are they poisoning us and profiteering off it, they’re having a big belly laff at our expense. Just to rub it in, they add:
They’ll be here all
weekcentury. Even their company name/address is a laff riot:Just some down home country globalism, folks. Be sure and try the veal.
different clue
@Joseph E. Kelleam,
The tradeoff seems to be between : more convenience and worse food versus more work and better food.
Those with a public spirited sense of mission can try to bring this information you have just brought us to the attention of the satisfied mainstream. And hope some small per cent of the satisfied mainstream decide to try and find out how to act on it.
Meanwhile, those of us here who make up the dissatisfied side-stream may already be more motivated to do something to evade the mainstream mass-food reality which you open a window to here. Buy or even grow their own apples, maybe even from within America itself, and learn how to make their own home-made Apple Fruit Cup equivalents themselves, in their own home kitchens.
Joseph E. Kelleam
@different clue,
Sounds like a plan. But it’s just disheartening how our government doesn’t even pretend to represent its citizens’ interests. Neither does either political party or the media. We’re on our own.
different clue
@Joseph E. Kelleam,
Yes, we are on our own.
Yes, it is disheartening.
But once we can bring ourselves to accept that basic fact, then we can figure out how to improve the life, health and survival chances of all those who have brought themselves to accept that basic fact. We can all begin to enhance eachothers’ information levels and survival chances together.
Different bunch-loads of people will have different ideas about how to do that. I will again offer my my little acronyms of TAG and TOC. TAG stands for Theory Action Group and TOC stands for Theory Of Change. Different TAGs should feel free to pursue their own different TOCs. Representatives from the various TAGs and TOCs can sometimes get together at Meetings of the TAGs and TOCs to compare notes as to how one or another TOC seems to be working out for its TAG.
I suspect part of how we dissatisfied side-streamers can enhance our survival chances is by evolving a Better Green Life-Culture to offer refuge from the satisfied mainstreamers’ Worse Petro-SootyCoal Death-Culture. If individual satisfied mainstreamers become dissatisfied here and there, and if they see a viable Better Green-Life Culture emerging, they may well try to sincerely join it. Such efforts should be sniffed tested and extremely vetted for sincerity, and if such efforts pass through the extreme vetting, such newly dissatisfied wannabe-ex mainstreamers should be educated and trained and inducted into the Better Green Life-Culture.
As to “government”, I remind myself sometimes that ” the government isnot a monolith”, just as they used to say that ” Communism is not a monolith”. The National Park Service is not my enemy, for example. And some of the agro-scientific researchers with the USDA do very good pro-public work. For example. These particular people deserve our help and support and the respect of being learned about and learned from, where indicated.