Both Clinton and Reagan have said during their lives that it would take an alien invasion in order to have all the countries work together. The thought is that nothing short of an alien invasion could bring people of different backgrounds, religions and cultures to work together in unity. The United Nations is a good first step towards global cooperation but all it’s only a first step. It is not a perfect organization and nations are not united around the world by any stretch of imagination.
The World Health Organization has been a shame and a shame and a disgrace, from its initial silence over China’s coverup of early data on the outbreak through its unreasoning hostility toward Taiwan and its collusion with Beijing’s efforts to discredit the lab-leak hypothesis. The premier agency has failed.
The heroes so far in the pandemic has been the pharmaceutical agencies that have brought us the vaccines that have solved most of the problems. Pfizer, Moderna, AstaZeneca and Johnson & Johnson succeeded where the internationalists failed. Scientists in free market, capitalist economies have defeated the pandemic. There is still plenty of work to go, specifically with developing countries, but the vaccines are the golden tickets out of this nightmarish, Covid-filled world. The non-capitalist forces including the WHO, Covax, China and Russia have not saved the U.S. nor the rest of the world. The “global community” has not created the vaccine that American Pharmaceutical companies have.
Talks of sharing pharmaceutical R&D from the West with developing countries is not as straightforward as the Biden administration believes. Biden’s team thinks that if they force American pharmaceutical giants to give up patented vaccine secrets, it will allow the whole world to quickly get enough vaccines to definitively end the pandemic. Does the administration really believe that accelerating the dissemination of cutting-edge biotech around the world will enhance global security? How are we even sure or not if developing or emerging market countries have the knowledge and capabilities to manufacture vaccines in the same way as the U.S. or Germany? Is our problem really that we don’t have enough sophisticated biolabs operating in countries with varying safety standards around the world?
There is a very good chance that many of these biotech startups could go wrong. In the same way that car companies remain tied to the same countries because of R&D, along with technology, many countries have not been able to copy this technology. Even for China, with all its people and resources they have not been able to create aircraft at the level of Boeing and Airbus, despite many attempts. Boeing from the US, and Airbus from the EU make up 90% of the world market for airplanes. The better solution would be to have the pharmaceutical companies produce vaccines that other countries around the world could buy. Instead of government ownership of Big Pharma, Biden should look for ways to sell these vaccines around the world and in some cases even donate them.
