ZERO. DEBATE. HAPPENED.
This is one of the MOST important issues out there.
“Everyone should read Baker’s 10 April 2022 piece—the piece discusses an issue that’s literally one of the most important issues in the world.”
“I’m happy that Baker writes about this issue—this issue is a huge deal and almost nobody in our whole society ever talks about this.”
“The best issues to spotlight are the huge ones that—disturbingly—remain in the shadows.”
Dean Baker is a US economist who co-founded the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR)—Baker recently published one of the most striking pieces that I’ve read in a long time:
“Paul Krugman, China, mRNA Vaccines, and Right-Wing Populism” (10 April 2022)
Everyone should read Baker’s 10 April 2022 piece—the piece discusses an issue that’s literally one of the most important issues in the world.
And make sure to also read these excellent pieces from Baker:
Keep in mind that we’re talking about:
millions of lives—that’s a huge deal
trillions of dollars—that’s also a huge deal
See below my notes that summarize what I found to be the piece’s key points—the hyperlinks are all from Baker’s 10 April 2022 piece, and I organized my notes into my own sections and gave those sections my own titles.
China’s Vaccines
China’s Covid vaccines use an older non-mRNA technology, but they’re “actually quite effective in preventing serious illness and death” when it comes to Omicron
Hong Kong’s case fatality rate is 2.9% overall and 15.7% if you’re over 80
the 2.9% drops to 0.03%—and the 15.7% drops to just over 1%—if you’ve gotten three doses of the vaccination that China offers, so China’s vaccines are “highly effective in preventing death”
you see “high death rates” in Hong Kong and in mainland China—the reason is that they’ve “done a poor job in vaccinating the elderly”
it’s true that China’s vaccines haven’t been effective at stopping Omicron’s spread, but mRNA vaccines also haven’t been effective on this front
A Misguided View
people are strikingly eager to “wrongly blame the costs of China’s zero COVID-19 policy on its rejection of US-made mRNA vaccines”
this eagerness—in Baker’s view—“reflects an incredibly wrongheaded view of medical technology and the pandemic”
this misguided view has “likely cost millions of lives”
this misguided view has likely “substantially worsened inequality”
the US “should have taken the lead in pooling resources worldwide in order to maximize innovation and the deployment of effective vaccines, tests, and treatments”—the US instead “doubled down on government-granted patent monopolies as a mechanism for financing research”
Moderna
Moderna was “paid $483 million for developing its vaccine, then another $472 million to conduct its phase three clinical trials”—Moderna also got “advance purchase agreements for hundreds of millions of doses at close to $20 a shot”
Moderna’s shot “cost around $1.50 to manufacture and distribute”
with “this amount of government support”, it’s not surprising that Moderna has minted “at least five new billionaires”
a lot of money went to “Moderna’s billionaires” and to “other well-placed executives and researchers there and at other drug companies”
this money didn’t have to go to these people
this money could’ve instead gone to “expanding the child tax credit” or “subsidies for day care”
“not giving so much money to the drug industry” would also reduce “demand in the economy” and therefore help us reduce inflation
The Alternative
the vaccines are safe and effective—the issue is “whether the route we went was the most efficient”
we “should have been looking to finance open-source vaccine development”—this “would have meant that US and European researchers would be posting their results on the web for researchers around the world to view and examine” and the “same would be the case for researchers in China, Russia, India, Brazil, and elsewhere”
you need to pay the researchers—we’d pay the researchers in the same way that we paid Moderna’s researchers
suppose that “Moderna as a company wasn’t interested in taking part”—we’d just “pay their researchers directly”
“Moderna would threaten them with lawsuits over violating non-disclosure agreements, but the government could just agree to cover their legal expenses and any potential damages.”
“These lawsuits (against researchers for sharing their knowledge) would also have the great benefit of showing precisely how much Moderna and other drug companies care about human life.”
we’d need a “commitment in principle” to “some agreement on sharing costs among countries”—you wouldn’t have to work out the agreement in advance, since you’d be able to send payments “back and forth after the fact”
this “freely pooled technology” would’ve allowed us to have “massive stockpiles of every promising vaccine available at the time they were first approved by the FDA or other health oversight agencies”
giving “all the drug manufacturers in the world” complete “access to the mRNA technology as the vaccines were being tested” would’ve meant that we could very plausibly have had “stockpiles of billions of doses” ready to go at the moment that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were approved
doses only cost $1.00–$1.50 to produce—it would be trivial to “throw out a billion doses” when you consider the “benefits of being able to quickly put 1 billion doses in people’s arms”
we could also “have had large stockpiles of China’s vaccines”—these vaccines were “less effective than the mRNA vaccines, but hugely more effective than no vaccine”
we could’ve “rushed to distribute doses of stockpiles of all the vaccines that proved effective” and distributed those doses “as quickly as possible”
this faster distribution could’ve prevented the Omicron variant and “possibly even the Delta variant”
this faster distribution “could have saved millions of lives”
this faster distribution could’ve “prevented the loss of trillions of dollars of economic activity”
Right-Wing Politics
our policies around intellectual property channel income and wealth upward
this is a policy decision
intellectual property plays an “enormous role in the growth of inequality”
people “say that we wouldn’t have any innovation without patent and copyright monopolies” and then “tell us that technology is causing inequality”—this is a glaring self-contradiction
Baker quips: “If the contradiction between those two claims is not immediately apparent, then you could be a leading intellectual pontificating on economic policy.”
“patent and copyright monopolies are very explicitly government policies” and we “can make them longer and stronger, or shorter and weaker, or not have them at all”—it’s “absurd to claim both that we need patent and copyright monopolies and that technology is driving inequality”
regarding Covid vaccines, we “never even had a serious policy debate over relying on patent monopolies”
the “policies that might challenge the upward redistribution of income are not even allowed to be discussed”—this is true even when a different approach might “save millions of lives and trillions of dollars”
“elite ideology dominates public debate”
“the people who control major news outlets and other arenas of public debate do not want any discussion of the ways we have structured the economy to redistribute so much income upward”
it’s “not supposed to be up for debate” that so many people are doing so badly economically—you’re allowed to “feel sorry for them and want to have a better social welfare state”, but you’re not allowed to challenge whether we ought to structure things so that they’re doing badly economically in the first place and so that someone at Moderna is a billionaire in the first place
given this context where debate is so constrained, it’s no wonder that people who aren’t doing well economically feel little “affinity for the politicians who see them as losers and support the policies that make them losers”
it’s no wonder that these people who aren’t doing well economically choose instead to support “right-wing populists” who “may not have a serious route for improving the plight of the working class, but they can at least present a villain and tell the working class how their situation was imposed on them, rather than the result of their own failings”
“Many had hoped that revulsion against Putin and the Russian invasion of Ukraine would be a death blow to the right-wing populists, who were generally very friendly towards Putin. With Viktor Orban winning reelection in Hungary, Marine Le Pen seriously challenging for the presidency of France, and the stench of Donald Trump still haunting US politics, clearly the right-wing populists are not about to fade away. It would be nice if we could have some more serious thinking about the conditions that created the atmosphere for their political ascendency.”
I’m happy that Baker writes about this issue—this issue is a huge deal and almost nobody in our whole society ever talks about this. The best issues to spotlight are the huge ones that—disturbingly—remain in the shadows.
Great perspective, thank you for sharing! Did you hear about this development that happened a few months ago?
https://www.devex.com/news/how-a-texas-team-created-the-first-open-source-covid-19-shot-102500