Demon Profits Come First!
In the drive for profits, the World Bank in 1980 published a new healthcare sector policy advocating reducing public health infrastructure, opening the door to rampant privatization of health services, and pharmaceutical supply.1 Treatment became primary, not public health needs and disease prevention which require a robust, well-staffed national, public health infrastructure. This profit model spread to the U.S. and many other parts of the world.
Since the 1980s the U.S. Public Health System has been neglected, defunded, and privatized under both Democratic and Republican administrations, damaging the science of Public Health and the ability to protect the people from infectious disease pandemics. A massive public health system with clinics, labs and hospitals fully staffed, ready to identify infectious diseases, then test, trace and isolate, makes no short-term profits. For Wall Street and bankers, disease prevention is a waste of money; they have abandoned the science of public health.
Vaccines and treatments make money, and limiting hospital bed capacity keeps profits high. For decades, pharmaceutical companies have been the most profitable corporations in the U.S., and Wall Street private equity firms have essentially taken control of the healthcare industry—pumping in $30 billion in 2018.2
Accumulation of profits has become the basis for socioeconomic life—most decisions are governed by Wall Street’s expected profits on new investments. The U.S. government and the public, now own very little as the economy has been largely privatized.
The top ten percent of the U.S. population owns 88 percent of the value of stocks, and the top one percent owns 56 percent. The U.S. Federal Reserve Bank is continuing to pour $150 Billion a month into the stock market, while ten-million jobs disappear, and workers fall further into debt. The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.
Enter the Covid-19 pandemic: The government is neither willing nor capable of protecting the people. A crippled, impoverished Public Health System, deliberately neglected in favor of treatments, can no longer protect the people from preventable disease and death. Witness the ongoing death toll, already over half-a-million U.S. deaths and millions more sickened from Covid-19. All of which could have been prevented with public health measures, to stop the spread of the virus. Strict public health science policy has successfully stopped transmission and eradicated the virus in several countries preventing many deaths. As of March 24, 2021, Taiwan has had ten deaths, Viet Nam 35 deaths, Singapore 30 deaths New Zealand 35 deaths, and China with a population over one billion has had 4,851 deaths. In the U.S. and many other countries, when science gets in the way of making a profit, it gets thrown out the window. Former Vice President Mike Pence maintained that science should not stand in the way of opening schools.3
Vaccines and treatments can never prevent a new pandemic. They can only protect after millions have sickened and died, as confirmed by the Covid-19 pandemic. The British Medical Journal has labeled this as social murder.4 Vaccines and treatment make huge profits for Wall Street at the cost of massive disease and death as the virus and its deadly variants continue to sweep through the land. Politicians are doing the opposite of what science requires, by removing limited public health measures and “opening up the economy,” while over 100 million people have not been vaccinated. A new wave of death and disease will keep profits high on Wall Street.
An economic system that consciously commits mass social murder for profit must be swept away and replaced by a society driven by the health needs of the people. An independent, direct action, mobilization of millions of employed and unemployed workers can stop the economy of death and demand science for the people by building a militant egalitarian movement that fights for social, political, and economic equality for all.
1 http://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/649631468138271858/pdf/40968ocr.pdf
2 “Major U.S. Health Insurers Report Big Profits, Benefiting From the Pandemic,” The New York Times (nytimes.com)