Brazil after the collapse

‘Health experts warned about it for weeks. In early March, the Brazilian health system entered a state of collapse under the weight of a nationwide spike in COVID-19 infections. Hospitals were not able to attend to all patients who needed treatment. By the end of March, all over Brazil, more than 6000 people were waiting for an ICU bed, most of them in overcrowded health centres and emergency wards without the necessary equipment and personnel for treatment.

‘In parallel, the power bases of the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro eroded in rapid fashion after he seemed to have consolidated his power in early February with the election of his preferred candidates to the powerful positions of speaker of the Parliament and of the Senate.’

Read here (The Bullet, Apr 13, 2021) 

Fighting the medical monopoly: Mobilising for Zero-Covid and decommodified healthcare

‘As I have discussed in an article on Interferon 2b and Cuba’s other treatments for COVID-19, decommodified universal healthcare is the alternative to monopoly-driven healthcare ravaging countries around the globe. Not for profit production and delivery of all health related goods responding to general and specific human needs of the majority of any given country is the only means to assure quality health for all, in pandemic as well as non-pandemic times.

‘More concretely, decommodified universal healthcare is ecologically sound, public sector production of everything from food to psychological support, medicines to medical technology, and medical care. Rather than results based management and other corporate models adopted by most state owned enterprises globally in the past four decades, such public production would be designed and managed democratically by citizens, health professionals, scientists, and the range of other workers involved.

‘Taxation of corporations and rich individuals would be the primary means of financing decommodified universal healthcare. Due to the social importance of health related goods, and high employment potential given the extent of need in most countries around the globe, decommodified universal healthcare would constitute a significant segment of needs based, ecologically sound, nationally focused economies.’

Read here (The Bullet, Mar 4, 2021)

100,000 deaths and a White Paper: What we need instead in Britain

‘We must refuse to engage on this paltry terrain. The pandemic, and the government’s abject failure to respond to it, should prompt a radical set of popular demands. Not since 1948 has there been such overwhelming public support for the NHS, or for the medical scientists and public health experts without whose knowledge and warnings even more lives would have been lost. In this context, and in recognition of how close we have come to an even greater disaster, we must reject this tinkering with the status quo.

‘Integration’ has served as a useful cover for Simon Stevens’s dismantling of the Lansley competition-based model, but it is a perverse misnomer for what the white paper proposes to embody in law. True integration is incompatible with a system of in-built conflicts of interest. Decisions about service provision need to be clearly accountable both to Parliament, and locally, to the public, neither of which is the case in what is proposed. Integration of healthcare with social care is indeed also needed, but is only possible if social care also becomes a public service. And neither this, nor adequate funding for the NHS, is ‘unaffordable’, especially while real interest rates are negative. What is unaffordable is to face the next pandemic as unprotected as we were for COVID-19.’

Read here (The Bullet, Mar 2, 2021)

Vaccine nationalism? An incurable disease called hope

‘It is disheartening to see ‘vaccine nationalism’ eclipse the hope around the development of the vaccine. The rich countries, with 13% of the world’s population, have already secured 3.4 billion doses of the potential vaccines; the rest of the world has pre-committed vaccine orders of 2.4 billion doses. The poorest countries, with a population of 700 million people, have no agreements for the vaccine. They depend on the Covax vaccine, developed in partnership between the World Health Organization, the Vaccine Alliance (GAVI), and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI). Covax has agreements to secure about 500 million doses, which would be enough to vaccinate 250 million people and cover about 20% of the populations of the poorest countries. In contrast, the United States of America, by itself, has made agreements to purchase enough doses to cover 230% of its population and could eventually control 1.8 billion doses (about a quarter of the world’s near-term supply).

‘The way things are going, two-thirds of the world’s population will not have a vaccine before the end of 2022... The struggle between ‘vaccine nationalism’ and the ‘people’s vaccine’ mirrors the fight between the North and the South over questions of debt and over vast areas of human development... Precious resources need to go toward testing, tracing, and isolation to break the chain of infection of the virus; they need to go toward building up the public health infrastructure, including training health care professionals who would need to give the two-dose injection to billions of people; they need to be used for the building of regional pharmaceutical production; and certainly they need to go toward the immediate relief for people, including income support, food provision, and social protection against the shadow pandemic of patriarchal violence.’

Read here (The Bullet, Dec 4, 2020) 

Covid vaccines: Calling the shots

‘The lesson of the coronavirus vaccine response is that a few billion dollars a year spent on additional basic research could prevent a thousand times as much loss in death, illness, and economic destruction. At a news conference, US health adviser, Anthony Fauci, highlighted the spike protein work. “We shouldn’t underestimate the value of basic biology research,” Fauci said. Exactly. But as many authors, such as Mariana Mazzacuto have shown, state funding and research has been vital to development of such products.

‘What better lesson can we learn from the COVID vaccine experience than that the multi-national pharma companies should be publicly owned so that research and development can be directed to meet the health and medical needs of people rather than to the profits of these companies. Then the necessary vaccines can get to the billions in the poorest countries and circumstances rather than to just those countries and people who can afford to pay the prices set by these companies.

“This is the people’s vaccine,” said corporate critic Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen’s Access to Medicines program. “Federal scientists helped invent it and taxpayers are funding its development. … It should belong to humanity.”

Read here (The Bullet, Dec 2, 2020)