This week, the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response, a body established by the World Health Organization, released a paper that argues that “global health has been ‘left hostage’ to Big Pharma.” Such a claim equates the actions of pharmaceutical companies with the actions of kidnappers. This is a grossly unjust accusation.
A kidnapper seeks to obtain a value—money—through coercion. Big Pharma has created life-saving vaccines and asks for compensation for the values they have produced. To equate the production of values with an attempt to seize values by force is intellectually dishonest and morally corrupt.
Condemnations of Big Pharma are an injustice. We should be giving thanks to these companies for producing life-saving products.
The paper states,
The idea that a poor health worker is unprotected while the healthy and wealthy receive booster doses should present a deep moral quandary. To this there is only one solution—vaccine equity.
Despite the panel’s claim, there is no “deep moral quandary.” The companies that have developed and produced vaccines own those values, and they have a moral right to trade those values on terms that they find acceptable.
The report goes on to state,
Global health cannot be left hostage to a pharmaceutical industry which buys up patents for promising products… and develops them in the interest of making profits. This system does not achieve the right balance between innovation and global public goods.
Finding the right balance between “innovation and global public goods” is impossible if one embraces altruism, which the panel clearly does. Altruism is the creed of self-sacrifice, and the panel calls upon Big Pharma to sacrifice for the world’s poor. Big Pharma, they claim, should produce life-saving medicines, not for their own profit, but to be good altruists. This is what the panel means by “vaccine equity.”
The report laments that less than 5 percent of the population in low-income countries has received even a single dose of a vaccine. In high-income countries, 67 percent are fully vaccinated, and many have received a booster. Income is a consequence of production. Individuals in high-income countries produce more life-sustaining values than individuals in low-income countries. Among those values are vaccines. Those who produce more have a moral right to consume more. This is a particularly relevant point on Thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving, Ayn Rand wrote,
is a producers’ holiday. The lavish meal is a symbol of the fact that abundant consumption is the result and reward of production.
On this Thanksgiving, we should enjoy abundant consumption as the result and reward of our production. As a matter of justice, we should also give thanks to Big Pharma for producing medicines that save our lives. They have earned our thanks.