Chaotic capitalism hampers COVID-19 vaccination campaigns

With the Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine recently approved for use in the UK; and products by Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna and others already being administered around the world, one would think we are approaching the end of this pandemic. However, pharmaceutical profiteers and political representatives of the ruling class are bungling the rollout in some of the worst-affected countries. In their haste to return to ‘normal’ and get the economy moving again, they are ignoring the science, cutting corners and putting lives at risk.

Despite ordering enough doses to vaccinate their populations several times over, governments in Europe, the US and the UK have already fallen well behind their vaccination targets. In Britain, where a new, highly virulent strain of the coronavirus is running riot, experts estimate that two million jabs a week are needed to start to bring the situation under control. Currently, about 250,000 jabs are being administered weekly. In the worst-hit country in the world, the USA, the government claimed 20 million people would be vaccinated in 2020. But the Centres for Disease Control (CDC) estimates just 4.2m shots were administered last year.

This is partly due to the irrationality of capitalist production, which has created gaps in the supply chain. Companies like Pfizer and Moderna have sold far more doses than they can currently supply, guaranteeing huge profits upfront. In order to meet their commitments, they have to strike deals with other companies for items ranging from DNA molecules to lipid nanoparticles: the tiny oily droplets that deliver their vaccine’s mRNA ingredient.

All of these commodities are owned by the private sector, which expects to be reimbursed. In short, private interests and a lack of central coordination are holding things up. By contrast, under socialism, all the necessary materials could be sourced and distributed immediately, without having to worry about businesses’ bottom lines.

The political representatives of the ruling class are bungling the vaccine rollout in some of the worst-affected countries / Image: Andrew Parsons, Flickr

But despite the protestations of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson that the sluggish rollout is all down to a shortage of supply, there are problems with distribution as well. Officially, there will be 530,000 doses of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine ready for use in Britain from Monday, along with an additional 450,000 in the subsequent 24 hours. A further 18 million are in various states of preparation and approval. On top of that, it is estimated that about 5m doses of the Pfizer vaccine are ready for use.

There is, however, a shortage of medics to administer them. The NHS (battered by years of underinvestment even before the coronavirus hit) is barely coping with the latest wave of infections. This disaster has resulted directly from the Tories’ hapless handling of the pandemic. Only this week, the government finally announced a national lockdown after weeks of prevarication, by which time the situation has spiralled well beyond their worst-case scenarios.

This puts huge strain on the health service, which already put out a call for trained volunteers to deal with the influx of patients around Christmas. Now GPs are warning of the need for an even-bigger recruitment drive in order to meet vaccination targets, possibly including military personnel, midwives, optometrists and even firefighters and lifeguards, in addition to retired medics. Then there is the issue of the special, ultra-cold fridges needed for the Pfizer and Moderna product, of which the British government has not sourced nearly enough. There is even a shortage of normal fridge space available for the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine. Or rather, there is plenty of fridge capacity: but it is in private hands (private hospitals, supermarkets, restaurants etc.), meaning the public purse will need to cover the costs.

The Tories couldn’t even get a working track-and-trace system organised, which is nothing compared to the logistical nightmare of a mass vaccine campaign. Once again, this degenerate government, and the rotten capitalist system it represents, are completely ill-equipped to manage this crisis. Under a planned economy, all essential resources and manpower could have been requisitioned and marshalled, and as many inoculation centres as necessary established across the country, to administer the vaccine. And of course, had the Tories enacted a serious lockdown at the beginning of the year, rather than prioritising the short-term interests of their big business cronies, we wouldn’t be in this position to begin with.

Off to a bad start

In Europe, a painfully slow rollout has seen all semblance of ‘unity’ against the common viral threat break down into bickering and recriminations within and between the EU member states. An agreement (spearheaded by Germany) saw responsibility for securing vaccine doses delegated to the European Commission. In theory, this should have allowed the entire continent to access 2bn doses: more than enough to vaccinate the entire EU population. But in practice, bureaucratic obstacles and incompetence in Brussels, combined with local variations in rollout speed, have resulted in a terribly inefficient and patchy inoculation campaign as each ruling class seeks to look out for its own interests first.

The EU has signed six vaccine contracts – with Moderna, AstraZeneca, Sanofi-GSK, Janssen Pharmaceutica NV, Pfizer-BioNTech and CureVac. But so far only the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine has been approved for use. The attempt at ‘diversification’ has meant the Commission paid for a lot of vaccines it can’t yet use, and doesn’t have enough of the one it has actually approved to meet demand. Finland, for example, only received about 40,000 doses in December, instead of the 300,000 that were expected. This, combined with the fact that richer EU countries have been able to secure additional doses outside of the joint purchasing agreement, is causing huge frustration across the bloc.

Despite seeming to handle the pandemic better than other countries up to now, the situation in Germany has deteriorated. Health Minister Jens Spahn is under fire for failing to secure enough vaccine doses, and being slow to start inoculations. Just 265,000 shots have been administered in the country, compared to about a million in Britain. This is despite the German government investing billions in BioNTech’s vaccine research. Chancellor Angela Merkel, once the golden child of sound governance in Europe, has come under fire after it turned out she personally intervened to block a purchase of more doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech drug. Even the most reliable bourgeois agent of the ‘European community’ has lost her lustre under this crisis.

In the Spanish state, the speed of vaccine distribution has varied wildly due to a lack of preparedness and administrative incompetence at the top. Asturias and Galicia have used half the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine doses allocated to these regions. But in Catalonia, a lack of trained nurses meant only 13 percent of the 60,000 doses supplied in the last week of December were actually used. And in the capital Madrid, only 6 percent of the first 49,000 doses have been administered. In all, about 0.1 percent of the Spanish population has been vaccinated so far. In the Netherlands, patients are only today beginning to receive jabs following big delays after the national IT network needed to be updated to allows local health authorities to track which vaccines have been delivered. All the big member states have been caught totally unprepared, once again.

Meanwhile, the far-right Brothers of Italy party is trying to exploit understandable public anger at the slow rollout by launching a public petition for a motion of no confidence in the Italian government. These reactionary opportunists are no friends of ordinary workers, but clearly the bourgeois Conte regime has totally failed to deal with the pandemic at every step. Italy suffered heavy casualties from the virus early on, and protests have since broken out over the economic fallout for ordinary people, as the government sought to prioritise the interests of big business rather than supporting workers. The languid vaccination campaign has only discredited the establishment further.

In short, the pressure of the coronavirus pandemic is continuing to accelerate the divisions eating away the foundations of the EU, exposing the rot at the heart of its political regimes as they struggle to cope. All of this is dragging out the pandemic and putting countless lives at risk. The situation is particularly acute in France, where the bourgeois Macron government planned to vaccinate 20 million people in the first half of 2021. It has so far inoculated just 350 people, despite receiving 500,000 doses of the BioNTech vaccine.

Despite aiming to vaccinate 20m people by the middle of 2021, so far France has vaccinated just 350 / Image: IMF, Flickr

Vaccine wariness is higher in France than anywhere else in Europe, partly due to lingering resentment over the failure of the H1N1 flu vaccination campaign in 2009, but mostly to a deep and profound distrust in the establishment and all its works following years of austerity, betrayals and repression. The Macron government tried to mitigate these concerns with a very tentative, ‘phased’ rollout – starting with elderly people in care homes, and relying mostly on family doctors. This backfired spectacularly.

“Going slowly doesn’t build confidence,” explained Philippe Juvin, head of the emergency department at the Georges Pompidou hospital in Paris. “On the contrary, it supports the idea that there is something to worry about.” Indeed, 40 percent of French people polled by Ipsos last week said they planned to be vaccinated, down from 54 per cent in October. This huge miscalculation only worsened “fundamental problems of preparation”, Juvin explained, pointing to the specialised freezers and 400 testing centres Germany secured in advance. “Where are ours?”

Macron then performed one of his signature about-faces, promising in a televised New Year’s address to overhaul the country’s vaccination efforts, stating: “Every French person who wants to must be able to get vaccinated.” The government now says it will open mass public vaccination centres “before February”, but the damage has been done.

This hated regime of the rich has stumbled from one crisis to another ever since Macron was elected in 2017. His confidence and authority have been shattered, as these vacillating vaccination efforts attest. Had the French labour leaders given a lead to any of the mass movements of past years – from the gilets jaunes movement in 2018 to the massive strike wave a year ago – the Macron government could have been brought down, a workers’ government could have been established and this disaster averted.

Finally, in India – the country with the second-highest death and infection rate after the USA – a locally developed coronavirus vaccine (Covaxin) was approved for use despite Bharat Biotech not revealing its testing data. Malini Aisola, co-convener of the All India Drug Action Network, a health watchdog based in New Delhi, stated that she is “extremely alarmed and shocked because this is really signifying the grant of regulatory approval without efficacy data... The government has taken this accelerated process too far.” Between the lasting economic impact of the draconian lockdown in March, a rising peasants revolt, and skyrocketing COVID-19 casualties, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is clearly desperate to rush out a vaccine – even before it is confirmed to be safe – to maintain his authority and get business up and running.

Ignoring the science

This kind of recklessness is not limited to India. All over the world, political representatives of the ruling class are locked in a deadly race with a virus they have utterly failed to manage or contain. Faced with overrun hospitals and spiralling infection rates, and determined to get the economy going again at any cost, many of them are turning to so-called pragmatic measures. In plain English, this means cutting corners.

In Britain, the government is hoping to stretch its available vaccine supply by lengthening the recommended intervals between the two necessary doses from around three weeks to three months. It is also suggesting a ‘mix-and-match’ approach in emergencies: for example, where a second dose of the Pfizer vaccine is not available, administering a patient the Oxford/AstraZeneca product.

In their haste to restore economic normality, bourgeois politicians are taking big risks that will hamper vaccination efforts / Image: Lisa Ferdinando

With the former, the rationale is that a lower-but-broader level of immunity might be preferable in the short term, and full immunity can still be achieved at a later date. But it is still not clear how long immunity is retained, especially after just one dose. The idea was justified by Britain’s chief medical officers, who pointed out that participants in Oxford’s UK study sometimes got their second dose between four and 12 weeks after the first.

However, a 21-day interval remains the recommended advice from Pfizer/BioNTech, and obviously it is not in their financial interests for these major products to fail. Data in their phase three trials were based on participants receiving their second dose only nine days after the first. A review in the New England Journal of Medicine found an efficacy rate of 52 percent after the first dose: higher than the protection level required for a COVID-19 vaccine by the US regulator, but far less than the 90+ percent for the full course.

There is an increased danger of new mutations if the virus is transmitted between millions of people with only partial immunity. It also raises the risk people might refuse, or simply forget, to take their second dose. Bearing in mind that between 70 and 80 percent of the population need to be immune for the virus to die out, this is clearly worrying.

Meanwhile, there is zero data behind Britain’s proposal to mix vaccines. The Pfizer and Oxford/AstraZeneca products are based on totally different technologies, and Stephen Evans, a professor in pharmacoepidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told the Financial Times the approach was “not supported by randomised trial evidence”. Furthermore, CDC states categorically the coronavirus vaccines are not interchangeable. “None of this is being data-driven right now,” echoed Dr. Phyllis Tien, infectious disease physician at the University of California, “we’re kind of in this Wild West.”

And Britain is leading the rest of the world across this new frontier, with the US considering extending the period between doses, and Germany and Denmark ready to follow suit. In their desperation to get profits flowing again as quickly as possible, the political representatives of the ruling class are jeopardising their vaccination efforts, with billions of workers, poor and youth set to suffer the consequences if these drugs don’t have the expected effect. Given that public confidence in these vaccines is already low, it is incredibly irresponsible for governments to take risky shortcuts on a whim. This will only deter even more people from getting vaccinated, which will further hamper efforts to beat the virus.

Vaccine Apartheid

As we have written before, hoarding by the richest western countries is putting any vaccine out of reach for billions. Despite providing the bulk of cheap test subjects for Pfizer’s human trials, countries like South Africa, Argentina, Brazil and Turkey will not receive enough of the vaccine to inoculate their populations. As far as Big Pharma is concerned, poor people in these countries are fine as guinea pigs, but they aren’t worthy of a proper supply of vaccines.

Vaccine nationalism always favours countries that can afford to pay the Big Pharma profiteers. The WHO’s COVAX programme, which calls on international cooperation to bring vaccines to the poor world, faces “a very high risk of failure” due to underfunding and a lack of participation from the US and China. Meanwhile, the World Bank is providing aid for the delivery of vaccines in the form of loans, thus deepening Third World debt. “We’re facing a global vaccine apartheid,” said Zain Rizvi, law and policy researcher at Public Citizen.

In Israel, this term is especially apt. Despite inoculating a tenth of its population already (the highest proportion anywhere) and shipping out vaccines to settlers in the occupied territories, Palestinians living there might be waiting months for COVAX to provide them with vaccines. This means that, while Israelis could see a return to some normality in the near future, the Palestinians remain trapped with the virus.

Moreover, despite toothless regulations to prevent private interests dictating access to medicine in poor countries, Big Pharma is jealously protective of its intellectual property to avoid the production of cheaper derivatives. Even those like Moderna that agree not to enforce patents on COVID-19 vaccines refuse to share their research. These fatcats shouldn’t be allowed to get away with this, but you can’t control what you don’t own. A socialist society would simply expropriate the pharmaceutical pirates under workers’ control, and put their knowledge and technique in the service of humanity.

When will it end?

As the pandemic grinds on, the fight for socialism is ever-more urgent. The longer the virus runs amok, the greater risk of it mutating into a strain the existing vaccines can’t cope with. Already, Sir John Bell, regius professor of Medicine at the University of Oxford, has raised a “big question mark” over a mutant strain in South Africa. “The mutations associated with the South African form are really pretty substantial changes in the structure of the protein,” he said – specifically referring to the part of the virus that allows antibodies to stick to it. Cases of this strain have been found as far from South Africa as Great Britain. If Bell’s concerns are warranted, this is a very worrying development.

It is a tragedy that the essential task of manufacturing and distributing this vaccine has been left to a system wracked by crisis and decay. Under socialism and a globally planned economy, so many of these pitfalls could have been avoided. It is the duty of the working class and youth worldwide to put an end to capitalism, rescue science from the straightjacket of the market, and chart a healthy, prosperous future for humanity.