Pandemic profiteering no more, according to The Guardian, reporting on the historic Healthier World initiative announced, at this year’s ongoing World Economic Forum (WEF), held in Davos, Switzerland. An initiative designed to implement the not-for-profit sale of patented medicines and vaccines to 45 low, and lower-middle-income countries. In other words, sales to more than 1.2 billion people, in countries like Afghanistan, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic, Eritrea, Liberia, Malawi, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Somalia and Sudan. Countries with a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita, hovering around 500 current US$, compared to the USA GDP per capita, for example, hovering around 60,000 current US$. (World Bank Data) Below, a YouTube video of Albert Bourla, CEO of Pfizer, announcing the Healthier World initiative, at the WEF.
The initiative was spearheaded by Pfizer, with the knowledge that other large pharmaceutical companies would follow suit. Accused of pandemic profiteering, after having accumulated 15 billion dollars in profits, in the first three months following the sale of COVID-19-related medications, Pfizer's initiative appears as a significant breakthrough, in an almost 100-year patenting problem.
The problem of inequitable access to therapies and vaccines, locked in patented price monopolies, that 19th-century public health officials, and European patent lawmakers, had already anticipated, having initially banned pharmaceutical drugs from the European patenting system of the late 1800s. A problem that was later also selectively circumvented, in the 1950s, when the push for patented pharmaceutical drugs finally succeeded, and individual inventors, such as Jonas Salk, who developed the first safe and effective vaccine against polio, refused to file for a patent. A move that Albert Sabin would also later follow, at the end of the 1960s, when he also refused to patent the oral polio vaccine that he had developed.
At a rate of almost 60,000 polio cases per year, in the US alone, in the 1950s, affecting mostly children, and hundreds of thousands more children worldwide, the inventors' refusal to patent their inventions saved countless children from living crippled lives of irreversible paralysis. As a result today, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), as few as 33 cases of polio are reported worldwide. (WHO Fact Sheet)
If talk of pandemic silver linings sends shivers down your spine, because there cannot be silver linings to what caused more than 1 million deaths in the US alone, and more than 5 million deaths worldwide, then the Pfizer initiative for a Healthier World, at the 2022 WEF in Davos, might be framed in another perspective. A well-documented view of the world as interconnected, which became shockingly clear to everyone, during the COVID-19 pandemic, where the coronavirus knew no borders. (Think Global Health)
References
Hart, R. (May 25, 2022). Pfizer offers low-cost drugs and vaccines, including COVID treatments to world's poorest countries. Forbes
Kollewe, J. (May 25, 2022). Pfizer to offer all of its drugs not-for-profit to 45 lower-income countries. The Guardian
The World Health Organization (WHO) – Fact sheet on Polyomyelitis
The World Health Organization (WHO) – Fact sheet on Polyomyelitis
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/poliomyelitis#:~:text=Key%20facts,their%20breathing%20muscles%20become%20immobilized
The World Health Organization (WHO) – WHO Coronavirus (COVID-19) Dashboard
The World Health Organization (WHO) – WHO Coronavirus (COVID-19) Dashboard
Think Global Health - The coronavirus knows no borders.
https://www.thinkglobalhealth.org/series/coronavirus-knows-no-borders
World Bank – GDP per capita
World Bank – GDP per capita
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD
World Economic Forum (WEF), May 22-26, 2022
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