The Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine will likely exceed $30 billion in 2021 alone. Pfizer shares its profits with its partner company—which means they are expecting at least $15 billion this year, bumping their total revenue next year to around $60 billion—one quarter of which will be accounted for by the vaccine. These sales will bring in a substantial profit for the company

According to one financial journalist “That would make it the second-highest revenue-generating drug anytime, anywhere.”

 Pfizer has sold very small quantities to the global distribution body Covax and African Union “at cost,” which it claims to be about $6.75 per dose. They’ve sold more than three times the amount to high income countries (1.6 billion) as they have to the rest of the world (560 million), while tiny quantities have been sold to low income countries. The international distribution network Covax has managed to secure a mere 40 million.

In fact, experts have suggested these types of vaccines could cost as little as 60 cents to $2 per dose to make. However, Pfizer is selling to most countries at $19.50 per dose, supposedly a special pandemic price, but clearly one which allows the corporation to make a large profit. It seems clear prices will rise steeply once they decide the pandemic is “over.” A senior executive has suggested $150-175 per dose would be more “normal” pricing for a vaccine of this sort.

Their accounts last year shows that the corporation returned a whopping $8.4 billion to shareholders in dividends and reported a profit of $8.7 billion.

Pfizer and its lobbying body PhRMA were the top spending lobbyists in the US healthcare sector in the last 2 decades. They use the power lobbying gives them to promote and extend their rights of secrecy (‘data exclusivity’) over medical development and their monopoly protection which allows them to charge astronomical prices. They support the US government including higher levels of monopoly protection in new trade deals.

Pfizer and its British distributor hugely hiked the prices of anti-epilepsy drug phenytoin which 48,000 NHS patients relied upon. NHS expenditure on the drug rose from £2 million a year to £50 million in a single year, with the cost of 100mg packs rising from £2.83 to £67.50. Overall, UK wholesalers and pharmacies faced price hikes of between 2,300% and 2,600%.

In 2009, Pfizer was forced to pay $2.3 billion in a set of complex suits which included the company’s illegal marketing of arthritis drug Bextra, as well as giving kickbacks to doctors.

 A whistleblower claimed that sales staff were incentivised to sell Bextra to doctors for medical conditions for which the drug wasn’t approved and at doses up to eight times those recommended.

 “At Pfizer I was expected to increase profits at all costs, even when sales meant endangering lives. I couldn’t do that,” he stated.

 The price of Pfizer’s pneumonia vaccines were 68 times more expensive in 2015 than in 2001. While Pfizer did reduce prices for the lowest income countries, MSF said the cost to vaccinate remained “roughly US$9 for each child to be vaccinated in the poorest countries, and as much as $80 per child for middle-income countries”. 

MSF claimed Pfizer and GSK have earned over $50 billion for the drug, but “Today, 55 million children around the world still do not have access to the pneumonia vaccine, largely due to high prices.”

Opinion | The Pandemic Has Shown Pfizer Is Obsessed With Profits—Not Saving Lives (commondreams.org)

  The Intercept details the “army of lobbyists” Big Pharma has aimed at U.S. lawmakers in order to thwart the global push to lift intellectual property through a waiver at the World Trade Organization.

The first quarter of 2021 reveal that “over 100 lobbyists have been mobilized to contact lawmakers and members of the Biden administration, urging them to oppose a proposed temporary waiver” of patent protections at the WTO.

 Mike McKay, a key fundraiser for House Democrats, now working on retainer for Pfizer, as well as several former staff members to the U.S. Office of Trade Representative, which oversees negotiations with the WTO.

Several trade groups funded by pharmaceutical firms have also focused closely on defeating the generic proposal, new disclosures show. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, and the International Intellectual Property Alliance, which all receive drug company money, have dispatched dozens of lobbyists to oppose the initiative.

‘Utterly Disgusting’: Big Pharma Lobby Blitz Against Vaccine Patent Waivers Denounced | Common Dreams News

 

Tucker Carlson is the latest right-winger who tries to link restricting immigration as a means of protecting the environment.

 “Unrestrained mass immigration has also put a huge strain on the natural world. Just the amount of pollution and litter and destruction that’s generated by the movement of hundreds of thousands of people, unrestrained, across the border. That’s not a small thing to me. But you never hear that. I’ve never heard anybody mention that. And it’s so awful.”

This is a repeat of his earlier claims that immigrants made the United States a “dirtier” country and were polluting the Potomac River.

He blames over-population for damage to the environment.

 “We have about 100 million more people living in the United States now than we had 30 years ago. What does that do to the environment? ”

 

And again

 

“Isn’t crowding your country the fastest way to despoil it, to pollute it, to make it, you know, a place you wouldn’t want to live?”

Needless to say, Carlson makes no mention of the environmental harm of building a huge wall.

It is a misguided belief which continues to be expressed by some parts of the environmental movement today that the root cause of environmental problems is population numbers couched in scientific-sounding terms as carrying capacity. Some eco-activists have become receptive to shutting down the borders, applauding population control and encouraging cuts in foreign aid.

It’s essential to ensure there is no confusion between population control and birth control: population control is the State domination over people’s reproduction while birth control involves individual women’s empowerment over their own bodies. Despite the history of  family control programs violating reproductive and human rights and the fact that there is already in progress a major slowing of global population growth, the focus on population is a mistaken one and leads to misguided action.

Reducing population growth has not had any beneficial effect on the degradation of the environment. Demographic data clearly shows while population growth rates have slowed in many countries and even declined in some, environmental damage continues to worsen. Therefore reducing population growth alone cannot solve global environmental problems. A steady-state economic system is necessary.

The World Socialist Movement has come across those in the environmentalist movement who promote the proposition that climate change is somehow driven by too many people and we have criticized them for inadvertently endorsing a racist eugenic program. Population growth, they argue, is responsible for environmental break-downs. Blaming environmental problems on population pressure is now all too common among environmentalists who still promote the view that population size is the primary cause of environmental problems.  Some right-wing extremists have infiltrated the green movement with attempts to link it to “nature worship”, full of Nazi “blood and soil” symbolism. 

This article in the Guardian  is worth quoting  from.

“…We’re seeing the far right really take up ecological arguments again,” said John Hultgren, a Bennington College environmental politics professor and author of Border Walls Gone Green: Nature and Anti-immigrant Politics in America. “The rise of eco-fascism, I think, is very real…You can be a genuine environmentalist and a genuine xenophobe – the two often do converge,” stated Hultgren.

The Guardian article explains that “…Anti-immigrant ideology has been part and parcel of the whole of American conservationism since the first national park was founded, in part to protect wild yet white-owned nature from Mexicans and Native Americans. National purity and natural purity were inextricably linked. The current rise of eco-minded white supremacy follows a direct line from the powerful attorney, conservationist and eugenicist Madison Grant – a friend of trees, Teddy Roosevelt, and the colonial superiority of white land stewardship…”

“…Environmentalists were hardcore eugenicists. They were as committed to racial thinking as they were to protecting the great redwoods in California,” said Heidi Beirich, intelligence project director at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Richard Spencer advocates for a kind of conservationism in the white nationalist tradition. Right-wing pundit Ann Coulter claimed Americans will have to choose between a “greening or browning” of America. Such claims  provide ‘intellectual’ succor to the mass-murderer, Patrick Crusius, who targeted Hispanics and killed 23 at El Paso in Texas, sharing with the Norwegian mass shooter Anders Breivik and the Australian Brenton Tarrant in New Zealand, the ‘Great Replacement’ racist ideas.

 Eco-xenophobia surfaced in the 1970s as overpopulation and resource depletion was deemed the foremost problem facing the planet. Global population growth was soon conflated with immigration growth. It was a belief that  inspired a network of anti-immigration within the ecology groups.

John Tanton, a local Sierra Club official, founded the Federation for American Immigration Reform to advance the overpopulation as an environmental harm cause. He went on to co-found the Center for Immigration Studies. Tanton, who warned of a “Latin onslaught” that would hurt America’s culture and the land.

“Deep Greens” in the 1980s and 1990s argued that humans were an invasive and destructive species.

Activist David Orton argued that limiting immigration “from a maintenance of biodiversity perspective … has nothing to do with fascists”.

The ecologist Dave Foreman was a co-founder of  Earth First! But his increasingly anti-immigration ideology led to his expulsion.

 Co-founder of Vice magazine and the Proud Boys Gavin McInnes espoused the ecological virtues of population and immigration control.

The eco-xenophobic rhetoric has proliferated and conflate both arguments about population growth and outright racist beliefs.

The prospect of a future mass movement of climate change refugees will feed into these anti-immigrant sentiments and the worsening climate crisis will easily align with anti-immigration activists looking to use environment protection as an excuse to close borders, as doing something about climate crisis.

 We should heed the analysis of Veery Marten, an Earth First! Journal collective member.

“The culprits of this white supremacist violence citing alleged environmental interests are almost always middle class white men who are not lowering their own carbon footprint. It’s not really about consumption, it’s about who’s allowed to consume and gate-keeping these resources…Mainstream environmentalists and the broader left may no longer espouse the benefits of limiting immigration, but many do warn of an impending global refugee crisis worsened by climate change that will in turn pressure societies unable or unwilling to grapple with an influx of new residents…”

 The Pentagon employs more than seven contractors for every one military personnel in Afghanistan.

As of January, more than 18,000 contractors remained in Afghanistan, according to a Defense Department report, when official troop totals had been reduced to 2,500. It reflect the U.S. government’s strategy of outsourcing war to the benefit of private mercenary corporations, and as a means of distancing the war from the public and averting dissent.

One of the biggest mercenary companies is DynCorp International of Falls Church Virginia, which as of 2019 had received over $7 billion in government contracts to train the Afghan army and manage military bases in Afghanistan.

From 2002 to 2013, DynCorp received 69 percent of all State Department funding. Forbes Magazine called it “one of the big winners of the Iraq and Afghan Wars”.

The U.S. has announced intentions to retain at least two military bases in Afghanistan after the official troop drawdown.

Afghans’ mineral wealth according to a 2007 United States Geological Service survey is nearly $1 trillion in mineral deposits, including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold, and critical industrial metals like lithium, which is used in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and cellphones. An internal Pentagon memo stated that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium.”

 The current Afghan government led by Ashraf Ghani’s military is funded by the United States at a cost of around $4 billion per year. This support is going to continue alongside large-scale U.S. foreign aid programs that amount to nearly $1 billion per year.

Biden isn’t ending the Afghanistan War, he’s privatizing it: Special Forces, Pentagon contractors, intelligence operatives will remain | The Grayzone

“The best crime prevention is increased opportunity and reduced poverty. That’s the best way to reduce crime. So there needs to be substantial funding into the infrastructure of our inner cities and our more deprived areas. Why do people get involved in crime and serious crime? It’s because the opportunities to make money elsewhere aren’t there for them.” – Retiring chief constable of Merseyside police, Andy Cooke.

 Tackle poverty and inequality to reduce crime, says police chief | Police | The Guardian

At least 120 asylum seekers are feared dead off the coast of Libya while they were attempting to reach Europe.

Mediterranean rescue hotline Alarm Phone, said,  “The people could have been rescued but all authorities knowingly left them to die at sea.”

The volunteer service claims it was in contact with the boat in distress over 10 hours on 21 April, and repeatedly relayed its GPS position and the dire situation to European and Libyan authorities.  It said all the European authorities rejected responsibility to coordinate the search operation and instead pointed at the Libyan authorities as the “competent” authorities.

“The Libyan coastguard, however, refused to launch or coordinate a rescue operation, leaving the 130 people out in a rough sea for a whole night,” the charity said.

“The lack of an efficient patrolling system is undeniable and unacceptable,” Flavio Di Giacomo, Italy’s spokesman for the UN migration agency, tweeted. “Things need to change.”

 A number of NGO rescue boats are stuck in Italian ports after authorities ordered their seizure. 

Conversations between at least three Libyan senior coastguards and Italian officials, expose the indifference of individuals on the Libyan side to the plight of migrants and to international law and their “uncooperative behaviour” which allegedly resulted in the deaths of hundreds of migrants.

More than 100 asylum seekers feared dead after shipwreck off Libya | Libya | The Guardian

Stickers are available on request from spgb@worldsocialism.org

 A dozen top megadonors have pumped a combined $3.4 billion dollars into federal elections since 2009, according to new research.

The massive sum  made up almost one out of every 13 dollars raised during that time period.

The analysis, put out this month by Issue One, a nonpartisan group working to curtail the influence of money in politics, shows that the top 12 big-dollar donors were split evenly between Democrats and Republicans. 

Issue One says the research underscores the flood of money that federal races have seen since restrictions were lifted by the Supreme Court in 2009. 

The Issue One report does not include any figures for state-level races or money given to nonprofit groups involved in any elections.

Top 12 political donors accounted for almost 1 of every 13 dollars raised since 2009: study | TheHill

 While the Western powers concentrate the media’s attention on their supposed military withdrawal from Afghanistan, much less focus is upon the drought that is inflicting much of the country.

13.1 million people are grappling with food shortages

Necephor Mghendi, Head of Delegation for Afghanistan, for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) says:

“This is one of the worst ever droughts in Afghanistan and millions of people are barely surviving. People are walking long distances, as drinking water is running out and crops are failing.” She explains, “We have grave fears for more than 18 million people who will need humanitarian support in Afghanistan this year due to this drought-driven food crisis piled on top of the debilitating social and economic impacts of COVID-19 and the long-running conflict. We are appealing for urgent action to help the Afghan people in this hour of extreme need. Millions of people urgently need more food, water and cash assistance to survive…”

Afghan Red Crescent Society Acting President, Dr Nilab Mobarez, said:

“We are deeply concerned about worsening and severe water shortages in many areas, depleted food crops and crippled economic activity, such as decimated local markets and basic incomes.”

Afghanistan: 13 million lack food as drought crisis bites – Afghanistan | ReliefWeb

 A Vietnamese anarchist critique of the so-called “socialism” of Vietnam is well worth a read.

The Broken Promises of Vietnam (libcom.org)

“…As Vietnam’s economy grows by leaps and bounds, so does the chasm between the rich and the poor. And no amount of welfare and regulation can stop the accumulation of capital or reverse the flow of wealth from the hands of the many into those of a few. Nowhere does this accumulation manifest itself more pervasively than in the system of land ownership. ​This system allows control of the land to be wrested from the peasants and the common people for little compensation and given to capitalists who often make many times more profit. All across the country, luxurious residential buildings sprung up but few of those displaced by them can afford to move in. The billionaire Phạm Nhật Vượng, whose family own as much wealth as 800,000 Vietnamese, couldn’t have built his empire without public properties being handed into to his pocket in this manner…”