If nothing else, the COVID-19 pandemic has been an incredibly instructive case study in what the neoliberal dogma that now governs our waking lives really means when stripped of artifice or pretense. As things stand, just a handful of profit-driven private companies currently control the knowledge and expertise required to produce vaccines — with people in many poorer countries not expected to be vaccinated until at least 2024. It didn’t have to be this way, of course.

Enabled by a monopolistic global intellectual property (IP) regime and with a tip of the hat to billionaire Bill Gates, Big Pharma and its political allies have largely succeeded in controlling and defining the narrative during the early vaccine rollout — transforming the prospective solution to a global crisis into yet another occasion for narrow corporate profit, in this case at the expense of public health and a speedy end to the pandemic.

The ground, however, may slowly be shifting. With the Biden administration’s recent announcement that it will support a waiver of IP protections for COVID vaccines, worldwide moral outrage toward vaccine apartheid may finally be having an impact. As for Gates himself, the billionaire is currently experiencing a messy divorce and may be facing the most serious crisis for his meticulously crafted personal image since the antitrust actions of the 1990s.