On Wednesday, May, 5, U.S. trade representative Katherine Tai announced that the Biden administration would be supporting a WTO initiative to temporarily place a waiver on the intellectual property rights of COVID vaccine developers. This waiver allows factories in the poorest, most vulnerable nations to manufacture generic vaccines — a step that many experts feel is critical to achieving worldwide vaccine equity and to address the developing pandemic narrative in which COVID rates are plunging in countries like the UK, Canada and the US while apocalyptic spikes rage in India, Brazil, Columbia and Argentina.
Prior to the rollout of vaccines, the wealthiest nations had the highest COVID rates (albeit, the poorest residents of the richest nations were the ones most devastated by the virus). If COVID has always been a barometer of inequity, with the vaccine, the boundaries between respite and suffering have become more clearly evident.
The news of Biden’s sudden willingness to confront the powerful drug cartels is both surprising, and faintly revealing that there may be new cracks in the foundation of neoliberalism — the hegemonic economic ideology, featuring the growth and deregulation of corporate spheres that has been unconditionally abided by every US administration since Reagan.
A series of pieces posted at “The Intercept” over the past two months — written by journalists, Lee Fang and Natasha Lennard — laid bare the problematic themes for US support of a vaccine waiver. The Biden administration has a number of appointees with historical ties to big pharma lobbying organizations, and at least a small number of officials with major stock holdings in Pfizer and BioNTech.
Biden also had ways to rationalize continued support for big pharma intellectual property rights by endorsing moderate solutions like COVAX — a brainchild of Bill Gates designed to showcase the charitable virtues of so-called generous billionaires and wealthy nations who donate (in grossly inadequate quantities) vaccines to poor countries. Gates has been a major advocate for big pharma interests and had made blatantly false claims that poor countries had no vaccine manufacturing infrastructure to take advantage of the waiver.
Biden has long been excoriated in progressive circles as a tool of corporate masters and a soulless career politician — utterly beholden to large donors. But Biden’s support for the WTO waiver challenges progressive orthodoxy.
Whether or not Biden is raptly reading the tea leaves of this historic moment, or resonating with the few progressive voices in the Democratic caucus — a group of ten senators, including Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Edward Markey had recently written a letter to Biden urging his support for the waiver — the news of his decision to endorse the waiver is, at least tentatively, a reason to optimistically consider that Joe Biden is a better person than many have believed.
Interestingly, the issue of the vaccine waiver had been almost exclusively covered in left wing media like The Intercept, or by various progressive podcasts such as “Democracy, Now.” It had been crickets regarding this topic at the large cable networks — MSNBC, CNN.
On a March broadcast, Rachal Maddow had interviewed Anthony Fauci, and when the epidemiologist had suggested that poor nations might manufacture their own vaccines, Maddow did not follow this thought up with any discussion of intellectual property rights and waivers. Her missed cue seems unlikely to have resulted from casual oversight, and yet immediately after Biden’s endorsement of vaccine waivers, she was beside herself with praise for the president.
Big pharma is, of course, a major sponsor of MSNBC political programming. It is not hard to understand Maddow’s internal conflicts.
Maddow’s quick shift from silence to unequivocal glee opens up an interesting point of speculation. Trump was able to almost completely coopt Fox News to join him with ever crazier and more paranoid narratives.
Does Biden have the wherewithal to reverse engineer the Trump experiment and use his heroic stature within the liberal cable news networks to ply people like Maddow away from their tacit corporate fealty? It is a bit premature to indulge such optimism, and yet Biden’s decision opens up fantasies about the potential trajectory of his administration.
Phil Wilson is a retired mental health worker from Northampton who was employed by nonprofit agencies in Franklin County for 25 years.