Covid-19 and the public sector - further reading
Today’s Guardian article has generated some interest and feedback, broadly under three headings.
One, just straightforwardly anti-socialist views. Two, scepticism through to dismissal of the relevance of the question to electoral politics. The article does refer to that point but it may be worth returning to it in due course.
And three, queries about more detail - in particular about the role of the public sector during the pandemic, in relation to the vaccines. I had argued that the free market has offered no solutions to the most fundamental aspects of the present pandemic and that the vaccines would have been impossible without the state.
On this last point, the following may be of interest to those who want to read more around the subject.
The science journalist Stephen Buranyi has written about this topic over at the New York Times, and he is interviewed about it here for Jacobin. Very interesting on wider issues of patents as well.
The Guardian’s report of the research that showed the high level of public sector and charitable support for the research underpinning vaccine development is here. It’s a useful corrective to Boris Johnson’s attempt to mobilise the vaccine as an example of the benefits of greed. They reported at the time:
At least 97% of the funding for the development of the Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine has been identified as coming from taxpayers or charitable trusts, according to the first attempt to reconstruct who paid for the decades of research that led to the lifesaving formulation.
Using two different methods of inquiry, researchers were able to identify the source of hundreds of millions of pounds of research grants from the year 2000 onwards for published work on what would eventually become the novel technology that underpins the jab, as well as funding for the final product.
The overwhelming majority of the money, especially in the early stages of the research, came from UK government departments, British and American scientific institutes, the European commission and charities including the Wellcome Trust.
Jon Trickett MP discusses that question over on Left Foot Forward, and makes the case for waiving the patents as part of an action plan to get the vaccine out to the vast numbers of people around the world currently not vaccinated at all.
On the question of the patents, the TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady made the case for a patent waiver in an interview for this newsletter last month.
Thanks once again to everyone who has responded to the article.