Vaccine capitalism

To the Editor:

To put it simply, we are being had. And the ones who are having us (call them the “haves”) are our very own pharmaceutical companies, you know, the ones we subsidized to the tune of billions of dollars to develop COVID vaccines. To paraphrase the old Gold Rush saying, “There's money in them `thar germs.”

A few years ago, a leaked Goldman Sachs memo to their big investors revealed the strategy. Their investment advisor suggested people not invest in companies who were working on a “cure” for diseases, but instead those developing “treatments” for them. The reasoning: cash flow. You can sell treatments to diseased people. If you cure them, no more sick people, no need for treatments, no more sales. Their example was Hepatitis C. Medications are lucrative. Cure people and revenue dries up. In speaking against cure, the memo further noted that Hep C is a sexually transmitted disease, so each infected person can infect others thereby creating new “customers” for treatment. And the beat goes on.

Which brings us back to COVID. Stopping its spread and, hopefully, eradicating it involves vaccination to create herd immunity. Continued transmission produces mutations and new variants. So, the pharmaceutical companies got free public money to develop a vaccine that they then sold to the government at a huge profit (Pfizer, $25 billion; Moderna, $19 billion), and now prevent other countries from making it and competing with them, which leads to more cases which leads to more variants for which they will make and sell a “booster” (boosting their profits, that is).

This is the capitalist business model. It is inhumane and immoral, but regrettably not unAmerican.

Phil Nichols

Sonora