The Making of India’s Vaccine Famine: Beyond the Global North v. Global South Duality by Swati Birla and Kuver Sinha https://spectrejournal.com/the-making-of-indias-vaccine-famine/
Extracts: The TRIPs waiver and easing of global trade regulations has now become the rallying cry for citizens’ groups, NGOs, and social movements across the world. In their call for action, prominent economists like Joseph Stiglitz, Jayati Ghosh, Rohinton Medhora, and others have argued for greater funding and political support for COVAX and a short-term TRIPs waiver, along with debt restructuring, as central planks to minimize the disparities between the Global South and North.
With the onset of liberalization in the 1990s, the responsibility to develop and manufacture vaccines was gradually relinquished as the state created a conducive environment for domestic pharmaceutical companies like Ranbaxy and Cipla through Patents Acts, foreign investment regulations, and amended industrial policies. India emerged as a leading generic drug maker and vaccine supplier during this period and by the middle of the decade pharmaceutical firms had started consolidating through mergers and acquisitions.
On the domestic front, on April 20, 2021, the SII received $400 million from the Indian central government’s vaccination budget to ramp up mass production of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine. (Concurrently, Bharat Biotech received $200 million to ramp up production of the indigenously developed Covaxin). This funding, which amounts to 10% of the entire vaccine budget in 2021-22, was presented as an advance payment for vaccines that the SII was supposed to produce and supply in the next 2-3 months.
The Indian state’s approach to securing vaccines thus follows the classic (and global) incentive and subsidy approach for vaccine manufacturers: a demand guarantee and a price floor. In the name of mitigating risks for innovation, this approach has funneled public money into two private sectors, vaccine manufacturing and as we shall show now, through drug pricing into privatized health care. .. The inexorable future toward which vaccine capitalism is taking us is a Covid endemic: a future where Covid is a treatable disease for the upper middle classes and a continuous deadly infectious disease with a steady level of fatalities among the poor. Post-pandemic vaccine pricing and royalty flows almost guarantee an indefinite and infinite future demand for vaccines, which will be priced at far above their current rates and will, on the one hand, serve as a conduit through which massive wealth will be transferred from the public to the private sector, while on the other, being used by the Indian state as soft power currency and foreign policy cudgel.
Pandemic capital.. is both tethered to the infrastructure of the state, to the geopolitical social and the body politic of nations; but like the virus it transcends the boundaries of nations. The second wave of Covid in India has once again revealed the global supply chains that undergird vaccine manufacture and the porous boundaries of nation states – made so by the movement of materials, people, viruses, bonds, risks, investments.
What of the language of vaccine diplomacy, geopolitics, and the Global North versus the Global South? Remaining ensconced within the broader ambit of capital, this language, often emanating from the Left and ostensibly directed against the West, has little power to confront immiseration in a post-pandemic future. Unless firmly opposed to vaccine capitalism – the commodification of public health and medicine, the loot of public wealth – unless militantly poised against the enormous power of venture capital and vaccine corporations, from AstraZeneca to SII, such a framework ultimately amounts to taking sides with one form of capital versus another.