Norris McDonald | COVID-19, the health crisis, Cuba, vaccines and ‘pandemnomics!’

Cuba’s international medical brigade has been nominated by several countries and many prominent personalities, such as Noam Chomsky, to receive the Noble Peace Prize for 2021 for providing international medical and humanitarian COVID-19 assistance to over 40 countries.

The COVID-19 pandemic has spread to over 200 countries, since its November 2019 onset, crashing their economies while overburdening their healthcare system.

The Cuban government and people urgently responded to the healthcare needs of many countries hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Cuba has shown genuine internationalism during the coronavirus crisis,” American political philosopher Noam Chomsky said.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has praised Cuba’s concept of developing Family Medicine that has been at the backbone of her ability to rise to the challenge, and despite personal suffering, still help others.

This is why the 2021 Noble Peace Prize would be a well-deserved tribute to the noble Cuban people.

DISASTER DRIVEN PROFITS

Let’s compare this with the Western countries, especially America and Great Britain, who, in the midst of this global COVID-19 pandemic, cut their financial assistance to poor countries of the world.

Despite a call from the WHO for a US$35-billion fund to be created, to pay for vaccines for the poor nations of the world, the rich industrialised nations are yet to heed this call.

In fact, both America and Great Britain did the opposite.

Instead of providing vaccine aid to poorer countries, Uncle Scrooge America cut foreign assistance by US$7 billion while Un-Kind, Great Britain, cut theirs by US$2 billion.

Vaccines, once proven safe and effective, can help fight diseases such as COVID-19.

Without vaccines, there is a greater chance of dying from Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) – a dangerous, crippling, lung and multi-organ disease associated with COVID-19, the novel coronavirus.

Vaccines play a vital role in saving human life. This is recognised by the international drug companies. This makes it central to the disaster-driven profit-making by individuals and big pharmaceutical corporations in the Western industrialised nations.

The big pharmaceutical companies and their investors, therefore, literally plan from one disaster to another – such as Ebola and COVID-19 pandemic – how to further increase their wealth based upon the misfortune of others.

Bill Gates, for example, rakes in a whopping US$200 billion from investments in vaccine production.

Gates explains this, the Financial Express reports in its September 27, 2020 online post, as a “social return on investment”, in which human society accrues some benefits. (See, financialexpress.com, September 27, 2020).

Poo-Poo!

The facts still remain that US$10 billion invested over time in vaccine production brought a return on investment of US$200 billion. And even if this includes social gains to society, as Bill Gates argues, the tax cover to his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, as a quid pro quo – something-for-something – is clearly balanced out.

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, American banks have also made US$27.7 billion in pre-tax profits, Market Watch reports.

Overall, Wall Street has made over US$12.5 trillion for US investors since the pandemic triggered an economic collapse.

HIGH PRICED DRUGS

Sales of cancer drugs are an important part of this profit-making by the big pharmaceutical companies.

“Cancer drugs are most profitable for big pharma,” Kevin Dickenson says in a February 7, 2020 news article, which highlights a whopping US$224 billion projected profits by 2024.

Meanwhile, debt service payments by the poor nations of the world are still higher than healthcare spending. World Bank data reveals that the most pauperised countries are still spending US$40 billion on debt repayment, even as they reel under COVID-19-triggered economic shocks.

And although the International Monetary Fund (IMF), in its October 2020 report, highlights the worsening in global income inequalities – made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic – we still have not seen the IMF, the World Bank and the industrialised nations offer significant help to the poorer countries.

This could come in the write-off of billions of dollars of debt payments that poor countries could use to revitalise their COVID-19-battered economies.

In the context of the novel coronavirus, there is no change in the political mentality of the rich nations and their leaders; no desire to think beyond their own narrow, petty self-interest.

In this heartless, inhumane world, many children have a chance of dying at birth in poor nations, and if they do survive, they face imperialist-driven wars, neocolonialist mad drive for profit, protein-nutrition deficiency – pervasive hunger and starvation – poor healthcare, absence of running water, disease and a poverty-ridden life.

‘PANDEMNOMICS’

Why profit from human suffering, especially in the context of this global COVID-19, novel coronavirus pandemic?

‘Pandemnomics’, my dear friends, is what it is all about.

‘Pandemnomics’ is the economics of the pandemic in which poor people, the middle class and small business suffer, while rich people, directly and indirectly, thrive through the stock market.

This concept, ‘pandemnomics’, explains the exuberant, profiteering-making from diseases such as this COVID-19 pandemic, and all forms of health crises and humanitarian disasters.

As a general rule, this ‘pandemnomics’ shows us how there exists contradictory business versus moral objectives: since it is difficult for big pharma and their financial backers to keep a straight face and say: “We are profiting from your healthcare misfortune!”

This is why many big pharmaceutical investors hide behind the mask of philanthropy.

The novel coronavirus has exposed the irrationality of the development strategies of the IMF and international capitalism that creates, and enhances, forced reverse income transfer from the poor to the rich.

Once we understand this ‘pandemnomics’, the way big pharma and their financial backers profit from health disasters, we are better prepared to wage a political fight to get them to change their callous business model.

Let us, therefore, make this coronavirus pandemic be a wake-up call for a more assertive struggle by all well-thinking people to create a world in which health disaster profit-making is not accepted as a normal way of life.

That is just the bitta truth!

- Norris McDonald is a respiratory therapist, social researcher and political analyst. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and miaminorris@yahoo.com.