There’s a campaign underway to kick podcast host Joe Rogan off Spotify for spreading COVID misinformation. But Rogan at his worst couldn’t do as much damage to public trust in science as the political and scientific establishment has during the pandemic.
Some have responded to Omicron with despair at the possibility of ever exiting the pandemic. Others have dismissed the new variant, given preliminary data suggesting milder disease. How should the Left navigate the evolution of the virus amid such uncertainty?
The media cheered Moderna’s pledge not to enforce the patents on its COVID-19 vaccine. But vaccines like theirs are still protected by intellectual property laws designed to keep medical knowledge out of the public’s hands.
Pharma giants have spent big on lobbying European Union officials over vaccine waivers. It’s paid off: now key European power brokers oppose suspending global vaccine patents to fight the pandemic in the Global South.
Perhaps months away from the first COVID-19 vaccines, their effectiveness may be threatened by growing anti-vaccination sentiment in the Global North. The Left should brook no vaccine skepticism in its ranks, but we should also work to prevent the conditions that give rise to such irrationality in the first place.
The US public poured billions of dollars into developing a COVID-19 vaccine, yet drug companies are reaping the profits and jealously guarding the intellectual property from poor countries. Let the drug companies cry: we should release the vaccines immediately.
People behind bars have suffered enormously during the pandemic, with COVID-19 ripping through prisons. There’s no justification for not giving prisoners the vaccine immediately — both for their sake and for the broader society.
Ebola is a problem that will not be solved, because it isn’t profitable to do so.
Thirty years ago, an urgent report about microbial threats to public health was ignored by policymakers.
For months, medical experts warned that leaving large areas of the world unvaccinated would make new variants inevitable. But for Big Pharma, profits come before public health.
Israel has been praised for launching an aggressive coronavirus vaccination drive. There’s just one problem: they’re excluding Palestinians in occupied territories.
The global battle over drug company patents for COVID-19 vaccines is the latest skirmish in the irrepressible conflict between property rights and human rights. It’s no surprise that Bill Gates, the monopolist billionaire, has taken the side of patents.
States are giving away a handful of college scholarships in a lottery for students who get vaccinated. It’s like something out of dystopian sci-fi: only a lucky few get to avoid crushing student debt, the rest suffer. It doesn’t have to be this way.
New drugs are developed with vast amounts of taxpayer money. But instead of universal access to these publicly funded scientific achievements, we get prohibitively expensive medicine and sky-high profits for pharmaceutical companies.
Our current model of pharmaceutical research is based on patent monopolies designed to enrich drug company executives and shareholders. But there's a better way to develop new drugs and vaccines, based on public funding and open-source research.
I worry that the racial discourse on COVID-19 could help pave the way for a eugenics-state that will ultimately do damage to poor black and brown people.
Omicron is coming for America’s overcrowded jails and prisons. Prioritizing vaccines for incarcerated people and rolling back our massive prison-industrial complex is good public health for everyone.
In Australia, decades of neoliberal policies have crippled our capacity to respond to public health crises like COVID.
If it’s not profitable for pharmaceutical companies to produce a cure, they won't produce a cure. We cannot win the fight against coronaviruses and future infectious diseases unless we properly fund a public sector that values public health over profit.
As we face down what the World Health Organization calls “a new normal” of high-impact epidemics, researchers and public health officials find themselves at war with for-profit pharmaceutical companies.