No Conspiracy Required: Vaccine Development & the Squeezing Out of the Third World
"Drug companies are wary of admitting publicly what everyone knows to be true: that the size of a market affects how much they invest in it." -- James Surowiecki in The New Yorker, December 20 & 27, 2004 (The Financial Page: Push & Pull)
Years ago, I began hearing what I took to be conspiracy theories about how the rich were always looking, under one pretext or another, for ways to further marginalize the poor from "good society". The educated trying to squeeze out the illiterate, the privileged to eliminate the disadvantaged, the powerful to pulverize the powerless.
Although the idea had a certain dramatic appeal, I, of course, quickly dismissed these as both exaggeration and oversimplification. Nothing, I knew, could be as cloak and dagger, as black and white, as all that.
More recently, however, I've come to realize that no such Social Darwinist conspiracy is required to nonetheless marginalize and ultimately wipe out an entire people group from good global society.
Reading James Surowiecki's recent editorial on vaccine development, for example, it is clear that modern market forces connected with the pharmaceutical industry prevent any meaningful solutions to Africa's disease problem. Consciously or not, the result is a culling of the population several times more effective than the most determined campaign of military genocide.
"Usually," writes Surowiecki, "a company that invents something useful doesn't have much trouble selling it. But vaccines - especially for diseases in the developing world - are notorious exceptions to this rule. To begin with, Third World countries have unimaginably tiny amounts to spend on public health. (The poorer African countries spend eighteen dollars per person a year on health. We spend five thousand dollars.)"
This, of course, virtually guarantees that disease will continue to be a part of daily life on that continent for years to come.
"Drug companies," he continues, "have put very little money into vaccine research. They'd much rather invest in an anti-arthritis drug that well-insured Americans will take every day than a vaccine that may command a fair price. (Just a few years ago, a promising malaria-vaccine candidate that had been tested in Papua, New Guinea was abandoned for lack of funding.) Meanwhile, diseases like malaria and tuberculosis have continued to ravage the Third World. Hundred of millions of people are newly affected every year."
Surowiecki does offer a couple of proactive solutions that could level the playing field and give meaningful vaccine development for the Third World a chance. Nonetheless, I couldn't help notice the net result of the current situation:
"The burden of disease has helped keep sub-Saharan Africa poor" and the population in check.
Am I accusing governments of conspiring with drug companies to squeeze out Africa's debt-, disease-, and poverty-ridden populations? No. Tempting as it is, I still refuse to believe that. But conspiracy or no, I can't help but wonder if, on some unconscious level, there isn't some grain of truth in those old rumours.
Years ago, I began hearing what I took to be conspiracy theories about how the rich were always looking, under one pretext or another, for ways to further marginalize the poor from "good society". The educated trying to squeeze out the illiterate, the privileged to eliminate the disadvantaged, the powerful to pulverize the powerless.
Although the idea had a certain dramatic appeal, I, of course, quickly dismissed these as both exaggeration and oversimplification. Nothing, I knew, could be as cloak and dagger, as black and white, as all that.
More recently, however, I've come to realize that no such Social Darwinist conspiracy is required to nonetheless marginalize and ultimately wipe out an entire people group from good global society.
Reading James Surowiecki's recent editorial on vaccine development, for example, it is clear that modern market forces connected with the pharmaceutical industry prevent any meaningful solutions to Africa's disease problem. Consciously or not, the result is a culling of the population several times more effective than the most determined campaign of military genocide.
"Usually," writes Surowiecki, "a company that invents something useful doesn't have much trouble selling it. But vaccines - especially for diseases in the developing world - are notorious exceptions to this rule. To begin with, Third World countries have unimaginably tiny amounts to spend on public health. (The poorer African countries spend eighteen dollars per person a year on health. We spend five thousand dollars.)"
This, of course, virtually guarantees that disease will continue to be a part of daily life on that continent for years to come.
"Drug companies," he continues, "have put very little money into vaccine research. They'd much rather invest in an anti-arthritis drug that well-insured Americans will take every day than a vaccine that may command a fair price. (Just a few years ago, a promising malaria-vaccine candidate that had been tested in Papua, New Guinea was abandoned for lack of funding.) Meanwhile, diseases like malaria and tuberculosis have continued to ravage the Third World. Hundred of millions of people are newly affected every year."
Surowiecki does offer a couple of proactive solutions that could level the playing field and give meaningful vaccine development for the Third World a chance. Nonetheless, I couldn't help notice the net result of the current situation:
"The burden of disease has helped keep sub-Saharan Africa poor" and the population in check.
Am I accusing governments of conspiring with drug companies to squeeze out Africa's debt-, disease-, and poverty-ridden populations? No. Tempting as it is, I still refuse to believe that. But conspiracy or no, I can't help but wonder if, on some unconscious level, there isn't some grain of truth in those old rumours.
posted by Paul Donnett at 9:27 PM
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