Vaccines on the cheap - Alfred Sant

The Biden administration in the US declared that temporarily, it will be disallowing patent rights charges on vaccines that have been developed to combat Covid-19. The pharmaceutical industry was not amused. The decision is expected to reduce the production expense needed for the outturn of vaccines so that their distribution and price in so-called Third World countries should become cheaper.

The Europeans had started to discuss a similar initiative but the US President’s decision caught them short.

Once again, the episode demonstrated how the US administration is giving full priority to social policy, and as in the immigration sector, has persisted in this even when its approaches ran into problems.

Many fail to understand how a country which gives first place to the “free market” can be run by a government with a social commitment. This for them has become even less intelligible since the time when President Reagan was the foremost promoter of the thesis that only the market knows best.

However the US also embodies a long tradition of ideas, movements and projects built on the greatest social commitment coupled to novel ways of mobilisation.

Recovery Programmes

The European Union is planning to spend many many billions of euros on projects meant to bolster and help the recovery of member states’ economies: they will be meant to counter and compensate for the huge destruction caused by the pandemic. Till there was agreement on how the funds were to be doled out and how financial responsibility for them was to be carried, all quarters involved in the discussion insisted on introducing a wide range of conditions to determine how projects were to be selected and how they would be run.

It seems to me that many of these conditions are so wideranging and stringent at different points that one finds it difficult to understand how the recovery funds being targeted could all be spent in time. Yet, the emphasis has long been on the urgent need for initiatives to proceed fast in order not to prevent European economies from crumbling.

Airlines

There is a lack of coherence in the EU’s competition policy, especially as it relates to airlines.

State aids are supposedly banned for such enterprises, except under certain conditions. Yet when at issue there is the difficult financial situation of one of the major air carriers, a way is soon found by which to stretch these conditions.

While it is repeatedly being said that airlines should respect the rules of the free market, there is also the belief that for Europe to compete with the airlines of other regions, it should encourage the development of 3 to 4 world scale “champions”. It is difficult to understand how this strategy can be followed while respecting free market rules.

Another proviso that gets referenced covers European funds and state aids meant to safeguard entrprises that have been badly affected by Covid19. These should not be deployed in favour of firms which were already close to bankruptcy prior to the pandemic, so we are told. On the basis of this rule, Covid aid funds should in practice not be extended at all to any European airline.

Post-Covid plan

It was quite the right idea to start preparing a plan for how the country should organise its exit from the state of crisis it had to maintain during the months (still ongoing) during which we needed to primarily counter the damage being done by the Covid-19 pandemic. Other European countries are doing the same, conscious of the challenge to get things back to “normal” as soon as possible.

The aim is also for the recovery plan to take into account the problems and difficulties being encountered by members of all social strata, if not all individuals.

The methodology being adopted is valid, since it covers extensive consultations bottom up, and not just the other way round.

While all sectors need to be given due attention, economic aspects shall be crucial. If they remain uncertain, the peace of mind that must be a central focus for the “new” normality could be eroded and the stability which is essential to the whole process undermined.

Maltese Desert...

The warning that the Maltese climate is drying up and heating at a rate that will soon classify the islands as a desert makes for disquieting news. To rein back this problem in a short while, what Malta can do will be far from sufficient.

Then, to contain it locally we would need huge volumes of water. They can only be obtained via “artificial” means relying on greater use of energy. The sources we depend upon for this up to now (oil and natural gas – coal was thankfully taken off the list some years back) are considered to be contributors to the phenomenon by which the global climate has continued to heat up.

The European Union is committed to the process of making it imperative for its members to decrease not increase use of the energy sources on which Malta now depends.

Parliamentary Debates

I suspect that since the Maltese Parliament started to broadcast, first on radio, then on TV, public interest in its affairs has declined not improved. Previously, the print media, especially in the English language, would daily publish detailed reports about what was being said during debates.

Newspapers would send to the House sittings their high calibre journalists who would deliver clinical and precise reports. The “Times of Malta” was preeminent in this approach although other papers also had very good reporters.

Today, the print media report less than anything about what is going on in Parliament, except when special circumstances prevail, or sometimes, in abridged stories that give little feel for how parliametary debates are developing.

True, the print media have seen their sales shrink enormously but even in their online versions, parliamentary reports are nowhere to be found. It is quite probable that both Parliament and the media have lost the “market” of readers who would not spend time viewing and listening to ongoing parliamentary debates but who might have been prepared to follow a clear account of House proceedings brought to them in a sustained and informative manner.