Who Saw Omicron Coming? Many, In Fact.
“If the mRNA technology that Pfizer and BioNTech and Moderna have developed and deployed…were to be shared with any number of these 120 companies, we could vaccinate the world in close to six months,” Prabhala explained. “It’s not theoretical. It’s based, in fact, on a model of existing partnerships that companies like Moderna have with very similar manufacturers, except they’re located in Spain instead of Bangladesh or Senegal or Tunisia.”
According to the latest data from the World Health Organization, more than two-thirds of people in high income countries have received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose; in low income countries, less than a tenth of the population has received one. There are still countries, mainly in Africa, where the vaccination rate is at or below one percent.
Lifting patent restrictions “loosens Moderna, Pfizer and BioNTech’s stranglehold on these vaccines,” Prabhala said. “It undercuts the massive tens of billions of dollars of profit and revenue that they can earn off selling to poor countries in the next couple of years, once they’re done with rich countries.” He offered a solution: “President Biden can bring Moderna to the White House, sit them across the table, say that we have laws that can force you to do what we are asking you to do, but we’d rather you just do it instead, work out that agreement, and then let it go and take credit for vaccinating the world.”
Biosecurity strategies in wealthy nations emphasized stockpiling vaccines for their populations, especially for providing booster shots to the general populace rather than for specifically the most vulnerable. By failing to compel vaccine manufacturers to release their technology or distribute more vaccines outside its own borders, the imperial core essentially threw the rest of of the world under the bus but still failed even to secure its own health. What this strategy did secure was massive profits for Pharma. Scientists were well aware this strategy would fail to keep us safe, and would lead inevitably to new variants that would jeopardize everyone, but as ever the voice of money spoke louder to government than the voice of science.