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1) The Unequal Distribution of Covid Vaccines Is a Preview of the Coming Climate Apartheid, The New RepublicThe Summit for Vaccine Internationalism offers a space for governments of developing countries to broker their own multilateral solutions. Richer countries have largely failed them."A week after the G7 patted itself on the back for agreeing charitably to hand out 500 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines (“a drop in the ocean,” as Amnesty International put it), a very different group of leaders will convene virtually on Friday to hash out a more durable way to bring the pandemic to an end. As the climate crisis accelerates, the meeting may also preview an alternative to the G7’s underwhelming climate dithering in Cornwall last week.
Only 6.2 percent of the world has been fully vaccinated, with just 0.3 of shots having gone to low-income countries. Eight-five percent have gone to upper-middle- and high-income countries like the United States, which has 13.1 percent of the world’s vaccines and just 4.3 percent of its population.
More Than 2.66 Billion Shots Given: Covid-19 TrackerBloomberg counted up the shots administered in 180 countries and 59 U.S. states and territories
The Summit for Vaccine Internationalism, convened by the Progressive International, brings together government ministers from Argentina, Bolivia, Mexico, Cuba, and Venezuela, and representatives of regional governments in Kenya and India, from the state of Kerala, alongside opposition leaders, health care unions, academics, and public health advocates. Four vaccine manufacturers will also be present: BioFarmaCuba; the Brazilian state manufacturer Fiocruz; Virchow Laboratories, an Indian manufacturer with a presence in over 100 countries; and Canadian firm Biolyse, which is seeking compulsory licensing agreements from its government to produce Johnson & Johnson vaccines. After a kick-off Friday, attendees—weighted toward the low- and middle-income countries still struggling to vaccinate their populations—will meet privately over the weekend to discuss new vaccine development and technology pools, sharing manufacturing capacity, as well as the potential to override intellectual property protections—what Bolivian foreign minister and summit participant Rogelio Mayta Mayta has called “collective disobedience.”
“We have the capacity to end this pandemic, producing and distributing Covid-19 vaccines for all. And yet the end is nowhere in sight. A nexus of Big Pharma and Global North governments is standing in the way,” summit coordinator and Progressive International cabinet member Varsha Gandikota-Nellutla said in an emailed press statement. “As long as the virus spreads, it can mutate and move. Ending the pandemic is not a question of charity. It is a question of survival. The longer we wait, the more we are at risk: billions of lives, North and South, vaccinated and unvaccinated.”
The international vaccine rollout has been a disaster. Early on, the Covax facility—a project of the public-private Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance—pledged to provide two billion doses to the developing world in 2021. So far, it’s delivered just 83 million. “That is a failure by any standard of logic or sense or mathematics,” Bangalore-based writer, campaigner, and summit attendee Achal Prabhala told me by phone. Early on, he explained, Covax opted to centralize production of the doses it planned to distribute at the Serum Institute in India. Amid a devastating outbreak in that country, exports stopped in March and, with them, hopes to speedily vaccinate the developing world. “Covax was devastated by this because of their own poor planning,” Prabhala said—but its problems run much deeper.Like its parent organization, Gavi has largely depended on the “largesse of pharmaceutical companies,” Prabhala said: “It truly believed, in the pandemic, that all you needed to do is talk to pharmaceutical companies.” It offered to buy jabs from Western manufacturers, including AstraZeneca and Novavax, before they had been approved, making it a good deal for those companies.
A related wrinkle is that Covax will only distribute vaccines approved in the West, or by the World Health Organization. Since that has, until recently, only included U.S. or U.K.-made vaccines, it largely ignored those produced elsewhere, like China’s Sinovac and CoronaVac. Now that Sinovac and Sinopharm, another Chinese vaccine, have gotten WHO approval, Covax will likely depend on them to help meet its already dangerously modest targets and pick up the slack left by more sparsely produced Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines. Though they’ve been approved, Covax has not delivered any Moderna or Johnson & Johnson doses.
The continuing crisis of international vaccine rollout is disturbing not just in its own right but for how it suggests the climate crisis will be handled. There are plenty of overlaps between the two challenges: The countries being worst hit by Covid-19 also tend to be worst hit by climate-fueled storms, droughts, and heatwaves. The violently unequal rollout brings other lessons, too. The White House has also been keen to frame climate action as a profitable opportunity for U.S. companies to hoard valuable green intellectual property and outcompete the administration’s geopolitical rivals. As Biden told a joint session of Congress, “We have to develop and dominate the products and technologies of the future: advanced batteries, biotechnology, computer chips, clean energy,” in order for the U.S. to “win the twenty-first century.” Making those critical technologies subject to the kind of retrograde intellectual property protections now constraining vaccines will allow corporations to charge exorbitant rents for the right to decarbonize. That not only poses barriers to deploying clean energy but could make cheap new coal plants—likely to keep running for decades—a more attractive option for countries where millions still lack electricity. No country will “win the twenty-first century” so long as investors and executives can choke off paths to low-carbon development.
When it comes to climate finance, public-private charity models in the vein of Covax are already failing. In 2009, wealthy governments pledged to deliver $100 billion for mitigation and adaptation funding to the developing world, in large part by “mobilizing” private capital. That hasn’t materialized, and much of the financing so far has come in the form of loans that add to many poorer countries’ already crushing debt burdens. There’s not much reason to think that U.S. clean energy manufacturers—which, like its biotech companies, have received generous public funding—will be any more forthcoming with carbon capture or battery production than Pfizer and Moderna have been with vaccines.Whether on clean energy or jabs, ditching patent protections is only a first step. Under intense pressure, the Biden administration finally did support waiving Covid-19-related IP at the World Trade Organization in May. What that didn’t come with was a commitment to compel pharmaceutical companies to share know-how for how to produce those vaccines with the rest of the world, despite the government having funded the basic research that created them. “There are genuine physical limits on what Pfzier and Moderna can make,” Prabhala says. “We’ve seen what they have, and it’s been barely enough for the richest countries. It’s a stretch to imagine that when they can’t satisfy the highest-paying countries, they can carve out the space for everyone else. The only way is to open up the manufacturing of vaccines we know work.”
The summit represents an attempt for lower-income countries to cooperate in the vacuum left by richer countries’ inaction, with lessons for navigating the hotter, wetter, and potentially sicker decades to come. Several low- and middle-income country governments are now looking for the ability to produce vaccines domestically, rather than to have paltry numbers of them delivered as charity. Bilateral deals have already happened between some countries in the global south, outside the purview of either Covax or the U.S. Iran, for instance, has agreed to produce Cuban vaccines. At the summit, Venezuela—another country suffering under U.S. sanctions—is expected to announce it will produce Cuban doses domestically, as well. The state-owned Chinese firm Sinopharm has an agreement with the United Arab Emirates to produce up to 200 billion doses a month there, along with co-production deals elsewhere that involve furnishing raw materials and technical expertise. “They’re distributing the ability to make the vaccine, which is very different than how Western pharmaceutical manufacturers have been operating,” leading to harsh shortages, Prabhala says. “There’s a kind of ideological capture that says we can only can be saved by a drug that comes out of London or New York. That’s not really true.”
The results of the summit will be announced at a press conference on Monday. If it’s successful, it could help bring a speedier end to the pandemic. It might also create a new, more solidaristic model for sorting out the other crises the twenty-first century is already bringing our way."
2) In the Wake of India’s Covid Crisis, a ‘Black Fungus’ Epidemic Follows, NY TIMES
"The deadly disease has sickened former coronavirus patients across the country. Doctors believe that hospitals desperate to keep Covid patients alive made choices that left them vulnerable."- https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/20/world/asia/india-covid-black-fungus.html
3) New book offers fresh details about chaos, conflicts inside Trump’s pandemic response, WAPOAt one point, the president mused about transferring infected American citizens in Asia to Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba"In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, as White House officials debated whether to bring infected Americans home for care, President Donald Trump suggested his own plan for where to send them, eager to suppress the numbers on U.S. soil.
“Don’t we have an island that we own?” the president reportedly asked those assembled in the Situation Room in February 2020, before the U.S. outbreak would explode. “What about Guantánamo?”
“We import goods,” Trump specified, lecturing his staff. “We are not going to import a virus.”
Aides were stunned, and when Trump brought it up a second time, they quickly scuttled the idea, worried about a backlash over quarantining American tourists on the same Caribbean base where the United States holds terrorism suspects.
Such insider conversations are among the revelations in “Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic That Changed History,” a new book by Washington Post journalists Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta that captures the dysfunctional response to the unfolding pandemic.
Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration's Response to the Pa...Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration's Response to the Pandemic That Changed History
Trump countered that the U.S. government never should have become involved in testing, arguing with his health secretary over why the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was seeking to track infections at all. “This was gross incompetence to let CDC develop a test,” Trump reportedly said as he berated Azar.The book — which draws on interviews with more than 180 people, including multiple White House senior staff members and government health leaders — offers new insights into last year’s chaotic and often-bungled response, portraying the power struggles over the leadership of the White House coronavirus task force, the unrelenting feuds that hampered cooperation and the enormous efforts made to prevent Trump from acting on his worst instincts. The Post obtained a copy of the book ahead of its June 29 publication.
The book offers new insights about Trump as the president careened between embracing miracle coronavirus cures in his quest for good news, grappling with his own illness — which was far more serious than officials acknowledged — and fretting about the outbreak’s implications for his reelection bid.
“Testing is killing me!” Trump reportedly exclaimed in a phone call to then-Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar on March 18, yelling so loudly that Azar’s aides overheard every word. “I’m going to lose the election because of testing! What idiot had the federal government do testing?”
“Uh, do you mean Jared?” Azar responded, citing the president’s senior adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Just five days earlier, Kushner had vowed to take charge of a national testing strategy with the help of the private sector, Abutaleb and Paletta write.
Public health experts contend it was inadequate testing that allowed the novel coronavirus to spread largely undetected across the United States in early 2020, making contact tracing and isolation all but impossible in the early days of the outbreak and fueling the first staggering wave of infections, hospitalizations and deaths.
Trump’s rages frequently distracted senior officials and slowed the national response, the authors found, with the president touting his hunches and eventually turning to handpicked advisers including the radiologist Scott Atlas, who had no infectious-disease or public health experience. But the book also depicts the president as ineffectual and out of touch while his health and national security officials tried to manage the worsening outbreak.
Despite his famous reality TV catchphrase “You’re fired,” Trump proved markedly ineffective at removing staffers during the pandemic, Abutaleb and Paletta write, boxed in by deputies who worried about political fallout and the implications of undermining public health.
Both men would stay on for the duration of Trump’s presidency, along with Anthony S. Fauci — the longtime infectious-disease expert who became a top target of Trump and his allies but whose public popularity helped insulate him. Rather than fire Fauci, White House officials increasingly tuned out the advice from him and other top health officials, the book says, with Trump instead leaning on Kushner, an array of economic advisers and other trusted allies who lacked infectious-disease expertise.For instance, Trump repeatedly told his aides in February to fire a senior State Department official who allowed 14 coronavirus-infected Americans on the Diamond Princess cruise ship to return home. The decision “doubles my numbers overnight,” the president complained to Azar, as the number of official U.S. coronavirus cases rose to 28.
But senior officials balked at firing the diplomat, and Trump and then-acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney eventually “gave up,” Abutaleb and Paletta write, adding that the official’s decision to bring the sick Americans back to the United States may have saved their lives, given there were no later flights they could take.
Trump also would call for firing Robert Kadlec, the HHS emergency preparedness chief who signed off on the Diamond Princess evacuation. Later, he would push to replace Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn when the agency chief refused to expedite vaccine approvals before the election and deferred to career FDA officials instead.
Trump’s top deputies adopted a similar strategy of issuing threats or isolating their rivals, undermining efforts to manage the outbreak, Abutaleb and Paletta write.
Kadlec, who had overseen the purchase of 600 million masks, took the plan in late March to Kushner — who exploded in anger, throwing his pen against the wall in frustration when he learned the masks would not arrive until June.
“You f---ing moron,” Kushner reportedly said. “We’ll all be dead by June.”
Mark Meadows, whom Trump abruptly installed as White House chief of staff with little warning to Mulvaney, also berated Kadlec as the federal government struggled to distribute a new antiviral treatment called remdesivir, whose use the FDA had just authorized.
“I’m going to fire your a-- if you can’t fix this!” Meadows reportedly yelled at Kadlec in a surprise phone call as the remdesivir rollout sputtered when scarce supplies were wrongly delivered to hospitals without eligible patients or appropriate refrigeration and the White House’s hopes for positive headlines slipped away.The book details smaller episodes that reveal the personalities at the heart of the Trump administration’s response that would play out in sometimes dysfunctional ways, including in the White House’s February 2020 announcement that “Ambassador Debbie Birx [would] serve as the White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator.” But Birx, a longtime infectious-disease expert, actually goes by “Debbi” — a point that Birx, a former military officer who was “ever respectful of the chain of command,” never sought to correct, even as the mistake was repeated. Birx would subsequently be pilloried for failing to correct Trump’s frequent misstatements, including an episode where she sat by as Trump riffed about injecting bleach to fight the virus — a comment that was tied to a subsequent reported spike in calls to emergency poison lines.“That was what the response had turned into: a toxic environment in which no matter where you turned, someone was ready to rip your head off or threatening to fire you,” Abutaleb and Paletta write.
“Nightmare Scenario” also captures the tensions as then-Vice President Mike Pence was installed as the new head of the coronavirus task force at the end of February 2020, replacing Azar. In subsequent days, Pence and his chief of staff, Marc Short, focused on the political and economic implications of the coronavirus response and approached many public health decisions by considering how they would be perceived.
For instance, Short complained that Trump was overreacting by listening to public health experts and opting to extend an economic pause through Easter 2020, characterizing the move as a gift to Democratic governors, the authors write. Short also pushed back against an HHS effort to send free masks to every American household in the response’s early days, a step that some public health experts think would have depoliticized mask-wearing but which Short believed would unnecessarily alarm people. Several senior officials also compared masks to “underwear on your face,” with one remarking that they looked like a “training bra.”
As Fauci’s popularity rose and public trust in other administration doctors plummeted, allies of Birx and CDC Director Robert Redfield chafed that Fauci was not being punished by the public for his own missteps, including advising Americans early in the outbreak that they did not need to wear masks before reversing course several weeks later.
The authors also look back for lessons that could inform the government’s response to future crises.
“One of the biggest flaws in the Trump administration’s response is that no one was in charge of the response,” Abutaleb and Paletta write. “Was it Birx, the task force coordinator? Was it Pence, head of the task force? Was it Trump, the boss? Was it Kushner, running the shadow task force until he wasn’t? Was it Marc Short or Mark Meadows, often at odds, rarely in sync?”
“Ultimately, there was no accountability, and the response was rudderless,” they conclude."
4) The Lab Leak Theory Doesn’t Hold Up, Foreign Policy"Behind every pandemic is a tale of its murky origin.
When HIV/AIDS emerged in the 1980s, it was alleged, with a little Soviet help, that the virus had been developed in an American lab. Between Washington’s inaction on the epidemic and its sordid past of shady experiments, proponents said the theory couldn’t be dismissed out of hand.
After many early cases of tick-borne Lyme disease were first identified around Long Island Sound, it was deemed too much of a coincidence that the U.S. military’s Plum Island animal research lab sat on an island in the sound itself.
When SARS emerged in 2003, so did fears of the severe acute respiratory syndrome’s unnatural origin. “It’s a very unusual outbreak,” bioweapons expert Ken Alibek told the New York Times at the time. “It’s hard to say whether it’s deliberate or natural.” One Russian scientist posited that “the propagation of the atypical pneumonia may well be caused by a leak of a combat virus grown in Asian bacteriological weapons labs.”
And in recent years, efforts to eradicate Ebola have been hobbled by attacks on health care workers motivated, at least in part, by a belief that the virus is man-made.
Blaming humans for disease is as old as time itself.
Blaming humans for disease is as old as time itself. It’s inherently hard to trace outbreaks that take tangled paths from their origin point to where they’re first detected. Without firm answers, humankind loves to invent stories, from the Black Death of the 14th century to the 2009 H1N1 outbreak. In the absence of certainty, both sets of theories—natural or man-made—seem plausible: like Schrödinger’s cat, for virology.
When infectious diseases can be explained, however, nature is almost always the culprit. After SARS emerged, scientists suspected that the coronavirus had jumped from a bat to another mammal—probably the masked palm civet—but couldn’t explain how it had appeared on a farm in Foshan, in China’s Guangdong province.
More than a decade after the outbreak, researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology discovered something interesting: Villagers who lived near bat-ridden caves in Yunnan province, around 900 miles from where the first outbreaks were recorded, had high levels of SARS antibodies, despite having never been infected. While it is next to impossible to figure out exactly how SARS traveled that distance, scientists are now fairly sure the journey began in that cave before passing to a mammal that ultimately infected a person.
Bats likely played a crucial role in incubating Ebola as well. A very similar strain of HIV to the ones seen in humans was discovered in chimpanzees in 1999, although it’s still unclear when exactly it jumped to humans. It’s still uncertain where Ebola or Lyme disease truly came from—and we may never know. But what we do know is that they almost certainly did not come from a U.S. government lab.
Perspective | No, Lyme disease is not an escaped military bioweapon, des...Some tick-spread bacteria could be weaponized — but this would be a pretty useless choice.
But, of course, sometimes governments do experiment on unwitting civilians. Sometimes viruses do escape from labs.
Yet although lab spillovers do happen, the vast majority are rapidly contained. Instances of serious outbreaks caused by malice or incompetence are vanishingly rare. One of the only known examples dates back to 1977, when a previously eliminated strain of H1N1 reemerged, likely as the result of a Soviet live vaccine program gone awry.
Given that history, it was no surprise that theories around COVID-19’s supposed lab origins emerged. But this time around, it’s not just idle speculation. It’s being taken as a serious possibility by some of the highest levels of the U.S. government—and by media keen for a new narrative.
When COVID-19 was first detected in December 2019, the Chinese government responded in its usual fashion: with repression and secrecy. Weeks of cover-up suddenly switched to countrywide containment. The ham-fisted attempt at secrecy raised the question: What else were they hiding?
It didn’t take long for online sleuths to hold up a compelling piece of evidence: The Wuhan Institute of Virology, the same one that had helped identify the likely origin of SARS, was just about 9 miles from the first reported outbreak.
In January 2020, the theory began on the fringes, with allegations of a secretive bioweapons program. Within weeks, the theory had broken loose on a network of shady and disreputable websites armed with little more than questions and supposition. The mainstream media’s silence, they said, was evidence of their complicity. They latched on to crumbs of evidence emerging in the early bedlam of the global pandemic, like a paper, later withdrawn, suggesting HIV genes had been inserted in the virus.
...Hence, SARS-CoV-2 was not derived from RaTG13,” Holmes said. Backing up what numerous other researchers have found, Holmes added that “the abundance, diversity and evolution of coronaviruses in wildlife strongly suggests that this virus is of natural origin.”
“Cramming 50 years of evolution into eight is impossible,” Goldstein said. “Forcing 1,000 nucleotide changes—just, no.”
But maybe this gain-of-function research did not try to replicate the virus in a petri dish but, instead, used live animals to multiply and mutate the virus—using one sick animal to infect the next, and the next, and the next, until an evolved and efficient virus came out the other end.
Following the theory down this path gets increasingly fantastical. “How complicated can this get?” Goldstein said. It would be significantly more expensive, labor-intensive, and difficult to hide. The lab would need to run a veritable petting zoo of different animals to perfect this kind of zoonotic transmission. And it still doesn’t account for the decades of necessary evolution.
Prior to the outbreak in December 2019, nothing closely resembling the COVID-19 virus was reported in any lab. Since it has emerged, it has taken hundreds of millions of infections to net just a handful of serious mutations and variants.
“We’re not good enough, in virology, to make the perfect virus,” Goldstein said.
Nature, however, is.Our best available theory is that COVID-19 likely originated in bats, quite likely from the same caves that begot SARS, and jumped through two other animals before reaching humans. Those three hosts led to a “complex pattern of evolutionary recombination.” Researchers have found close relatives to COVID-19 in pangolins and raccoon dogs, making them prime suspects in the so-called spillover event. While the Wuhan seafood market’s role in the pandemic is still unclear—whether it was truly the origin or just the first major outbreak—new research suggests it may be key to proving the natural origin theory. Despite insistence from Beijing that no live animals were kept at the market, a new paper in Scientific Reports
reveals photographic evidence that raccoon dogs were kept at the wet market. “Almost all animals were sold alive, caged, stacked and in poor condition,” the researchers found.This theory would mean COVID-19 jumped between three different animals and traveled about 1,000 miles.
Compare that with SARS: The virus went through two animals and traveled about 900 miles before leading to outbreaks in humans.
For the lab leak theory to work, the Wuhan lab would need to have either found a completely novel and hyperinfectious virus in the wild and kept it in a lab without telling anyone, or engineered that virus in a way that would stun scientists at more advanced American labs by truncating decades of evolution into just a few years.
Then, there would need to have been a catastrophic breach of safety protocol that infected one or more staffers from the lab—but also, the accident would need to have gone unnoticed, so that they simply walked out of the building when their shift was done.
“It sounds simpler than the alternative, but when you get into it, it’s much more complicated,” Goldstein said.
Peter Ben Embarek is a World Health Organization food security expert, tapped by the internationalist organization to fly to Wuhan and investigate the origins of the virus.
“The idea is to get the studies that are needed to get a better idea of the origin of the virus,” Ben Embarek told me in January. He and his team were headed to China agnostic about what, exactly, had caused the pandemic. “The approach is precisely not to follow all kinds of hypotheses,” he said. The science confirms the COVID-19 virus is a “natural virus,” not a bioweapon. But he acknowledged that “accidents happen” and they could not, then, discount the idea it had escaped from a lab.
I asked him about the lab leak theory. “This ‘growing body of evidence’—we haven’t seen it,” Ben Embarek said.
In a Feb. 9 press conference, after several weeks on the ground, Ben Embarek and his colleagues announced that they had seen enough to conclude that the lab leak theory was “extremely unlikely.”
“There had been no publication, no reports of this virus, of another virus extremely linked or closely linked to this, being worked with in any other laboratory in the world,” Ben Embarek noted then.
Over the past year, I’ve spoken with a slew of researchers, scientists, and public health experts: Their takes on the origins of COVID-19 generally fall into two camps. Most say that the virus is very likely natural and that theories around the Wuhan Institute of Virology are a possible explanation, but they’re unlikely. The other group, a minority, says both theories are more or less equally valid and that the lab leak theory is in desperate need of more study.
It’s hard to fault either camp.
But not all research is created equal.
Both Baker and Wade, for example, cite the husband-and-wife duo behind the Bioscience Resource Project, which published a paper last summer promoting the Mojiang miner theory. The project, however, largely focuses on crop science and has pushed junk science and misinformation about genetically modified organisms. Since the start of the pandemic, the group has pivoted toward taking on what they call “the pandemic virus industrial complex.”
One oft-cited editorial was written by a number of researchers who do not specialize in virology. The team of experts cited in the Vanity Fair article are mostly anonymous. Another prominent webpage compiling evidence for this argument, which Baker and Wade relied on heavily, is entirely anonymously produced.
And, of course, it’s hard to divorce many Republicans’ clear preference for the lab leak theory from their default position that China is a threat to global security.
Were some people, myself included, too glibly dismissive of the lab leak theory early on? Can a theory be right even when it’s pushed by bad actors for political ends and crank theorists? Sure. But that doesn’t mean the possibility wasn’t being actively explored. It was. There was not a conspiracy to silence research or speculation about the Wuhan lab.
Yet even after more than a year of study, the odds that the lab leak theory is correct remain roughly the same as when it was reported on a year ago—it’s theoretically possible but far less likely than zoonotic origin.
The Wuhan Virus Is Not a Lab-Made BioweaponConspiracy theories are spreading faster than the coronavirus itself.
The origin of this virus matters. Yes, if Beijing is culpable for the origin of the novel coronavirus it merits repercussions—and even if it is not, China still needs to be held accountable for its obfuscation.
If the caves of Yunnan and the surrounding ecosystem gave us two highly infectious coronaviruses in two decades, there is no telling when the next such coronavirus could emerge—or from where.
If the COVID-19 virus, as previous viruses have done, hopped between various animals, perfecting its ability to infect humans along the way, it’s another indicator of how humanity’s intrusions into wilderness are unearthing new pathogens at a worryingly fast rate. That requires a substantial rethink of how we settle the Earth and how we manage wild nature.
That, of course, is a more unsettling prospect than simply blaming Beijing.
Discovering, with absolute certainty, the exact origin of COVID-19 may be impossible. But it is crucial that we let science, not hype or anxiety, determine the possible scenarios.
As Rofer told me: “We all feel a loss of control. And a way to understand this is to understand the origin.”
5) Fashion Forward, by Gemma Correll, The NIB6) Long Read: India’s Vaccine Makers Are Pandemic Profiteers, Not Humanitarians, The INTERCEPTThe Indian government’s free-market approach to vaccine distribution has privileged profit over lives."IN APRIL, a deadly Covid-19 surge overtook India as the country’s overflowing hospitals and crematoria made global headlines. While new daily cases are now reportedly in decline, the overall death toll continues to rise — estimated to exceed official figures at well over 1 million. At the height of the surge, India’s vaccination rate began falling, and just 3.5 percent of India’s 1.3 billion people are fully vaccinated.Most global media coverage has attributed the ongoing crisis to two key causes: the Indian government’s mismanaged pandemic response and Big Pharma. Over the last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his far-right government engaged in superspreader theatrics rather than disaster mitigation. Meanwhile, by upholding patents on Covid-19 vaccines, pharmaceutical companies in the U.S. and Europe have denied low- and middle-income countries the ability to produce lifesaving vaccines, creating a system of global vaccine apartheid that devalues non-Western lives.
Amid the censure of the Modi government and Big Pharma, India’s health care capitalists have gone largely unnoticed. Aided at each step by the government’s free-market approach to vaccine distribution, India’s very own Big Pharma has used the pandemic to strengthen market shares, grow profits, and place vaccines behind a paywall unscalable for most people in a country riven with dire systemic inequalities.
“The Indian vaccine ‘market’ is held in a vise-like grip of a vaccine duopoly,” journalist V. Sridhar, who has written about the country’s vaccination failures for the Indian news magazine Frontline, told me in a message. “What else would you call this duopoly but vaccine barons?”
Almost all of India’s vaccine supply comes from the country’s two largest vaccine producers: Serum Institute of India, led by CEO Adar Poonawalla, and Bharat Biotech, run by founder Krishna Ella. While both companies have repeatedly advertised their vaccines as the cheapest in the world, they seldom mention that those vaccines are also the world’s most profitable. For each dose sold to private hospitals, Serum makes profits of up to 2,000 percent — what Poonawalla might consider “super profits” — and Bharat Biotech up to 4,000 percent. In comparison, based on the estimated cost to make one dose, Pfizer’s and Moderna’s profit margins are 650 percent and 500 percent, respectively.
“Disasters are a fabulous business,” journalist P. Sainath writes in his recent piece on India’s widening wealth inequality. “There is always money to be made in the misery of the many.” India’s Covid-19 disaster is no exception.
The Prince of ProfitPoonawalla is one of India’s premier pandemic profiteers. He is the 40-year-old son of India’s eighth-richest man, from whom he inherited the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer. Among Western progressives, generics are often discussed as a public health solution to Big Pharma profiteering. Generics manufacturers like Poonawalla, however, are still businesspeople working for profit, not humanitarians motivated by the public good.
Pune-based Serum makes 1.5 billion doses of various vaccines every year and sells them across 170 countries. Poonawalla sees Serum, with its sizable production capacity, as “almost designed for [a pandemic],” and the company has seized on its “once-in-a lifetime opportunity.” In 2020, Serum entered a partnership with British-Swedish company AstraZeneca through which Serum could produce the Oxford University vaccine in exchange for royalties. With the resulting vaccine — known in India as Covishield — Serum captured 90 percent of the country’s vaccine market share. The company also committed up to 200 million doses for export to the global vaccine-sharing initiative COVAX.
Despite Serum’s lucrative licensing agreement with AstraZeneca, Poonawalla has been one of the loudest voices decrying global vaccine inequality and Western Big Pharma. In March, Poonawalla objected to U.S. President Joe Biden’s use of the Defense Production Act, which stipulated that U.S. companies manufacturing vaccine raw materials must prioritize U.S. government contracts. Poonawalla criticized the move and in April tweeted at Biden to “lift the embargo.”
Recent analysis notes how Poonawalla’s demand for raw materials “placed him at the heart of several heroic imaginations.” This was especially true once India’s Covid-19 surge became front-page news in April. Indian, global, and even socialist media picked up and amplified Poonawalla’s rebuke, pointing to U.S. hoarding of raw materials as a humanitarian concern right alongside India’s pressing need for oxygen and personal protective equipment. As activist and humanitarian pressure to release the raw materials mounted, Biden removed export restrictions on bags, vials, filters, and other materials. A White House spokesperson said in a statement that the U.S. had agreed to release “specific raw material urgently required for Indian manufacture of the Covishield vaccine.”US does a turnaround on vaccine raw material supply after NSA talks; Rus...Experts believe that the US will achieve the target of vaccinating its entire adult population soon
The spokesperson was mistaken, as was much of the global media. Poonawalla went on the record multiple times to clarify that his request was not for Covishield or indeed for any vaccine approved to inoculate Indians. Since January, Serum has had the capacity to produce around 5,000 doses of Covishield per minute. Rather, the raw materials Poonawalla sourced from the U.S. are for a new Covid-19 vaccine Serum is producing in commercial partnership with U.S. company Novavax. Poonawalla was able to benefit from activist outrage to secure vaccine raw materials that would do nothing to mitigate India’s public health crisis. Serum declined to comment on the record for this piece.
Media coverage has facilitated Poonawalla’s enterprising use of the gray zone between humanitarianism and commerce during the pandemic. While Serum has always emphasized its “philanthropic philosophy,” the company’s founding family has mostly been known for their ostentatious wealth — be it their majestic farmhouse where they hosted Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall; their luxury car collection that includes a one-of-a-kind Batmobile; or the refurbished aircraft that houses Poonawalla’s office.
But ever since Poonawalla became an early investor in the AstraZeneca vaccine, news stories have praised him as a “vaccine prince” — a risk-embracing entrepreneur with a moral mission. The media’s acceptance of how Poonawalla presents himself explains how easily he has been cited as an advocate for global public health rather than as a billionaire CEO advancing his company’s commercial interests. Journalistic sympathy for Poonawalla often comes at the cost of fair reporting. For instance, the media’s portrayal of Serum’s vaccine exports as a charitable “bid to protect the world” obscures the fact that Serum is charging poorer countries up to $7 for the same vaccine dose that the European Union is getting from AstraZeneca at $2.
'Vaccine prince': the Indian billionaire set to make Covid jabs for the UKWestward ExpansionSerum Institute boss Adar Poonawalla has rented a Mayfair mansion for £50,000 a week
Poonawalla has been cast in news coverage not just as a disinterested advocate of public health, but also as a decolonial challenger to Big Pharma seeking to “save the world from coronavirus — and then radically remake the international pharma landscape.” Poonawalla’s supposed desire to transform the global pharmaceutical industry is extrapolated from his opposition to vaccine patents, especially as calls to “free the vaccine” from intellectual property restrictions have found salience in Western leftist circles.
“We’re seeing a new system of vaccine apartheid coming into place,” says Tobita Chow, director of Justice Is Global, an initiative that campaigns to remove Covid-19 patents. Many public health experts agree that a temporary waiver of the World Trade Organization’s Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, or TRIPS, provision is a necessary first step toward increasing vaccine production and access and creating a more competitive pharmaceutical industry worldwide. With sustained pressure from activists, last month the Biden administration signaled its support for a temporary TRIPS waiver, a measure initially proposed by the governments of India and South Africa.
On the surface, Poonawalla has echoed activist concerns about pharmaceutical patents. But his fight against patents is not the same as activists’ fight for a people’s vaccine. Poonawalla’s interest in a TRIPS waiver comes from his admitted intention to poach competitors’ shares in Western markets. “Though we’re already in 165 countries, I will also expand our global reach: pushing into Europe and the United States — markets that we’ve never been able to enter as we’ve been blocked by Big Pharma,” he told GQ India last year. “These are the new and final frontiers.”
Serum has expanded into those frontiers. In 2012, the company acquired Bilthoven Biologicals from the Netherlands government and since then its European presence has only grown. In May, as Covid-19 ravaged India and the country’s vaccine supply dried up, Poonawalla sequestered himself in his $69,000-a-week rental mansion in London as the British government announced that Serum would invest over $330 million in the U.K. to create a new sales office, expected to generate business worth over $1.4 billion. If the clinical trials mentioned in the announcement are any indication, the vaccines developed as part of this deal might target European markets.
Serum’s global ambitions illuminate Poonawalla’s real problem with Big Pharma. It is not that Poonawalla is against the commercialization or patenting of lifesaving drugs; rather, he opposes Big Pharma insofar as it blocks his own access to Western markets. This is why, while campaigning against the hoarding of U.S. raw materials or supporting calls to waive U.S. drug patents, Poonawalla had also been working with then-President Donald Trump to escape the “stupid rules and regulations” that prevented him from selling his products in the U.S.
The TRIPS waiver might become yet another humanitarian response to India’s viral surge that enriches Poonawalla.If these restrictions — raw material embargoes, patents, regulatory requirements — were waived for Covishield in Western markets, even at a price as high as $10 a dose, Covishield could easily outcompete the more expensive Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson vaccines while making a considerable profit. By undercutting competitors’ prices for Covid-19 vaccines, Serum could both expand its operations and trigger a race to the bottom, pushing other producers to consolidate or outsource to lower their prices. Back in 2016, Poonawalla had diagnosed that the pharmaceutical industry was experiencing “the lull before the storm” of acquisitions or mergers. If it succeeds in using the pandemic to break into Western markets, Serum could find itself riding the coming tidal wave of pharmaceutical industry consolidation.
The TRIPS waiver might become yet another humanitarian response to India’s coronavirus surge that enriches Poonawalla. The waiver could enable Serum to keep profiting from the AstraZeneca vaccine without paying royalties. Serum may also be able to develop a replica of the vaccine, the patent for which it could hold within India even as global patents are suspended. Several of the experts I interviewed saw the probability of such a vaccine monopoly emerging.
Poonawalla has done little to dispel these fears. Even as he stresses that Serum’s production capacity must increase to vaccinate the world’s poor, Poonawalla also maintains that there is no need to bring other manufacturers into the vaccine market to help increase supply.
Serum’s primary goal isn’t to equitably vaccinate the world or break down monopolies; it is to corner new markets while maintaining dominance within India. Without curbs on Serum’s power, the removal of global patents would not result in “freeing” the vaccine, only freeing streams of profit.
Immunity for SaleSerum is not the only Indian company engaging in vaccine profiteering. Bharat Biotech, which developed Covaxin with public funds, has been charging Indians exorbitant rates for each shot — up to about $5.40 for states and about $16 for private hospitals — despite founder Ella’s early assurance that the vaccine would cost less than a bottle of water. Bharat Biotech has also been expanding commercial Covaxin exports despite India’s recent export restrictions.
Unlike Serum’s Covishield, Covaxin is not restricted by any Big Pharma patent. The Indian government controls part of Covaxin’s intellectual property rights, yet Bharat Biotech inexplicably monopolized production until a month ago, when the government finally greenlighted manufacturing of the vaccine in its own production facilities. Bharat Biotech declined to comment for this piece.
Throughout the pandemic, the Modi government has refused to curb pharmaceutical profiteering. Despite using taxpayer money to provide clinical trial support and sizable production advances to Serum and Bharat Biotech, the government has failed to ensure affordable vaccines for India’s people.
Until May, the central government had procured all the doses for $2 each — a price at which the vaccine companies are reported to have made between 188 percent to 500 percent in profits. But they wanted more.“When you’ve got low supply and high demand, what happens to the price? It skyrockets,” Poonawalla has said in describing how U.S. drug companies insulate themselves from competition with generics. Yet Poonawalla essentially politically engineered the same reality in India.
“By self-admission, India’s monopolistic vaccine producers were deeply unhappy with the ‘normal profits’ they earned at the regulated prices,” R. Ramakumar, a development economist at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, told me in a message. “They lobbied to ‘free’ prices. Not surprisingly, vaccine prices more than doubled, even tripled and quadrupled, over just one week.”
Do you have a coronavirus story you want to share? Email us at coron...@theintercept.com or use one of these secure methods to contact a reporter.The Indian government enabled the rise in prices with its “liberalized” vaccine distribution policy, deliberately manufacturing a seller’s market. Starting May 1, the central government stopped procuring and distributing all the country’s vaccines as it and almost every other government in the world had been doing up until then. Instead, the central government began buying only half of the vaccine supply, leaving India’s 28 states and private hospitals to compete for the remaining doses on the private market — at prices set by the vaccine companies. The Indian health ministry did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
By distributing vaccines through the open market, the Indian government fractured its citizens’ collective buying and bargaining power, giving up all leverage to capitalists. With a quarter of the country’s vaccine stock reserved for private hospitals, and vaccine producers vocalizing their preference to sell to those hospitals at higher prices, India’s vaccination drive was designed to favor private-sector monopolization.
The resulting inequalities have been stark. Private hospitals have outcompeted cash-starved states: In May, just nine hospital chains had cornered 50 percent of all doses.
India's 8 poorest states may spend 30% health budget on Covid vaccinationWhile India’s states pledged to vaccinate people for free, private hospitals voiced no such intention. Absent price caps, most of India’s impoverished population has either been paying exorbitant amounts to get vaccinated at private hospitals or waiting for government hospitals to acquire scarce doses.By distributing vaccines through the open market, the Indian government fractured its citizens’ collective buying and bargaining power, giving up all leverage to capitalists.“Imagine if the vaccine is sold at $10 to a family of four and they each need two doses,” health journalist Vidya Krishnan says. “How are they going to be able to afford it?” The average person in India makes an estimated $50 a month.
Add to the mix the Modi government’s disastrous economic policies from prior years, and vaccination becomes unattainable for most Indians.India’s vaccination plan for almost one-fifth of the world’s people has been so alarming that even the country’s judiciary and Modi’s own allies have joined journalists, opposition politicians, and medical experts in asking: Why no price standardization or price ceiling? Why not go back to centrally procuring vaccines instead of making states compete? Why not, as Krishnan asks, use the decades-old public vaccination system that was used to eradicate polio? Why not, as experts I interviewed suggest, waive patents within India and issue compulsory licenses so that more than two big companies could make vaccines?
In response to months of public outcry, last week Modi announced a partial reversal of his vaccine distribution “experiment.” Starting June 21, the central government will procure 75 percent of the country’s total vaccine stock directly from the companies, which it will give to state governments to distribute to their residents for free.
The change reverses one of the most politically controversial aspects of the previous policy but still leaves plenty of room for profiteering. A quarter of India’s vaccine stock will remain reserved for private hospitals and, consequently, for the rich. Even with price caps at private hospitals, vaccine manufacturers’ rates of profit will reach over 1,000 percent. As Yogesh Jain, a founder of the rural health care nonprofit Jan Swasthya Sahyog, wrote on Twitter, India’s vaccination capabilities will remain “publicly provided, and privately guzzled.”
The Modi government has tweaked India’s profit-centric vaccine policy, but as Ramakumar says, what is needed is an overhaul. Instead of using the powers at its disposal on behalf of the people, the Indian government continues to privilege profit over lives.
Profiteering as the Public GoodThe failures of India’s vaccination drive are reflective of the country’s overall pandemic response, characterized by the government’s strong support of private profiteering. India’s Supreme Court has repeatedly suggested that the central government has the power to speed up the manufacturing of oxygen and other essentials by investing public funds, which Indian cities like Madurai and states like Kerala have done successfully. But not only did the central government do nothing to increase its critically low oxygen capacity, it also allowed India’s industrial oxygen exports to rise by over 700 percent over the course of the pandemic instead of redirecting oxygen production to medical needs.
Unsurprisingly, the stock of oxygen corporations like Linde India shot up even as countless people gasped to death.“The government of India has withdrawn from the central social responsibility of an enlightened welfare state,” Ramakumar told me. “It has also opened the floodgates for a vulgar form of predatory capitalism to take over the stage amid the raging human tragedy.”
Poonawalla has claimed that “even God” couldn’t have foreseen the gravity of the crisis, but India’s pandemic disaster was long foretold. Things did not have to play out this way. India could have had medical supplies, PPE, testing kits, and vaccines ready if public health dictated production and distribution, rather than profits. Wherever vaccines have been administered on a mass scale, it has happened because at key moments of reckoning, public health advocates challenged the profit motive. But in India, profiteering itself masquerades as the public good.
In India, 38 new billionaires were minted in the past year, while the combined wealth of the country’s 140 billionaires went up by 90.4 percent.Pandemics often exacerbate preexisting sociopolitical dynamics, argues Nivedita Saksena, a fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health. India’s current situation is no exception. With a public health system that has been starved of funds for decades, and no viable alternative to for-profit health care, India’s Covid-19 pandemic was bound to become an opportunity for profiteering.
India’s big businesses have even managed to use aid from abroad to make money — which is why private hospitals sold airlifted oxygen cylinders to desperate patients, why vaccine raw materials from the U.S. are being used for disaster profiteering, and why a global patent waiver will likely strengthen the power of Indian Big Pharma.
To win a world where human life is truly valued above profit, we must realize that the small handful of very wealthy people who stand in the way of the public good are dispersed across the world — as much in Pune as in New York City. Their numbers are growing, as is their power within their home countries. In India alone, 38 new billionaires were minted in the past year, while the combined wealth of the country’s 140 billionaires went up by 90.4 percent. During the pandemic, Poonawalla’s net worth rose by 85 percent in five months, as tens of millions of Indians descended into poverty. This is not a coincidence, as P. Sainath writes, in “a year when hundreds of millions of Indians were hungrier than they’d been in decades.”
“A wealth ‘surge’ usually rides on a misery surge,” Sainath says. The swelling wallets of India’s health care elites are directly linked to the bodies in the streets. Until we eliminate the profitability of misery, India’s nightmare has no end in sight."
