The giant pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline said on Friday that its work on a vaccine for Ebola would “come too late” to do anything about the current crisis. Even now, it is trying to compress trials that would normally take a decade into a year. The impression it gives is that it is working flat-out, no holds barred.
However, hang on a moment. Ebola was discovered in 1976. What has GlaxoSmithKline been doing since then?
Not much.
Illustration: Mountain People
A small clue as to why can be found by looking at the stock price of Tekmira Pharmaceuticals, the Canadian-based pharmaceutical firm that some investors seem to think is leading the pack on Ebola research. Tekmira shares rose a massive 180 percent from mid-July to this month, with most of the share price action coming when the virus jumped to Europe and the US.
Ebola has been killing people in central and western Africa for at least 38 years — but it is only when the virus becomes a threat to the developed world that there is seen to be a profit in it. It sounds cynical to say it flat-out like that, but it sounds cynical because it is. What business case is there for developing drugs to save the lives of poor Africans when they are thought to lack the money to pay for treatment? Especially when there is so much more profit to be had in — for instance — giving rich white men erections.
As a study last year in the Lancet medical journal showed, of the 336 new drugs developed in the first decade of this century, just four were for what are known in jargon as “neglected tropical diseases”: three for malaria and one for diarrhea.
The point being this: The business model of market-driven Big Pharma does not work well to address the challenges posed by a virus that ultimately has no respect for geography or bank balances. Some of the developed world’s early interest in Ebola was in whether it could be weaponized. It was said that the Russian biological weapons unit — Biopreparat — had turned Ebola into an aerosol spray.
All of which is red meat for conspiracy theorists — like those who tell you that the patent for the Ebola virus is owned by the US government, which is true. However, that suspicion is not about shady government actions, but about basic capitalist economics.
Is it not interesting that there is money about to ask scientists to turn a virus into a weapon, but not money to ask scientists to find a vaccine? And by the time there is a market for a vaccine, it is too late?
What better example is there of what is commonly called market failure — that state of affairs in which market forces do not make for desirable outcomes?
Here is another: Remember former South African president Nelson Mandela having to take on Big Pharma as thousands of dying South Africans were unable to afford AIDS drugs?
Apparently, the market-driven economics of healthcare do not have an answer to a virus that begins in a part of the world where there is not much money. And that is often where dangerous viruses begin. Which is precisely why market forces will not be able to save the world.
Indeed, on the contrary, market-driven healthcare is incentivized to keep people sick. What profit is there in a healthy population? If everyone were healthy, it would be the job of the pharmaceutical companies to persuade people that they are not well — that certain things needed fixing, even if they do not.
It is a bit like Friedrich Nietzsche’s criticism of the Christian priest: The priest first has to poison people into imagining they are unwell — and thus in need of saving — before he can present himself as the cure, as salvation. There is no market for salvation in a sinless world.
Of course, Big Pharma presents itself as evidence-based and scientific. Not at all like Nietzsche’s take on Christianity. However, it is not the science that calls the tune. It is the stock price. And the stock price goes up when rich people feel threatened.
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