No to the patents! Vaccines for everyone! For a universal and free vaccination plan!
The pandemic of Covid 19 has already caused millions of deaths and infections around the world. But despite the fact that several vaccines were discovered in record time, millions watch in amazement as the big capitalist business behind them by a handful of multinational pharmaceutical companies and laboratories sponsored by imperialist and capitalist governments is preventing sufficient world production to urgently immunize the population of the planet. This business is protected by the patents and intellectual property regime of the World Trade Organization (WTO), which means that each of these companies has exclusivity to produce and sell them, when it should be an essential human right and heritage of humanity to save millions.
This was happening while the Ministry of Health proceeded in their “VIP vaccination” of their friends and closed ones, which has caused the resignation of the minister Ginés Gonzales García and a national political crisis. This happens in Argentina, just like in Peru, Chile and other countries while the working population of this countries suffer the consequences of the pandemic without a vaccine on the horizon for them.
In the face of this situation, we issue this statement of the FIT Unidad, promoting a campaign of struggle, in agreement with the current global campaign promoted by different organizations demanding the release of the medical patents for vaccines and medicines to fight Covid-19. Rejecting at the same time the repugnant secrecy and “confidentiality” systems of the governments, mainly on the part of the USA, Canada, England, the European Union, entering into contracts with advance payments to guarantee the vaccine for those countries, even in quantities that exceed several times their population, preventing the right of other semicolonial countries to have access to the vaccine for all their populations. The European Union, for example, bought doses that tripled its population, while countries on the African continent or in Latin America are completely left behind. Or Israel, a country that some people have called an example for topping the vaccination ranking, when almost none of the Palestinian people have been vaccinated.
Patents and intellectual property are nothing more than the private appropriation by imperialist multinationals of a common good, such as the scientific and technical knowledge that has been accumulated over decades as a result of multiple investigations in different countries (in universities, hospitals or research centers all over the planet) financed centrally with millions of dollars of public money. This monopolistic ownership is provoking all kinds of cruelties, a direct consequence of an imperialist capitalism guided by private profit. An anarchic and irrational system, the opposite of international cooperation for the production and planning essential for the social needs of the peoples of the world so that the vaccine is produced and reaches all people without distinction. The resulting struggle to put an end to the pandemic acquires well-defined social and political characteristics.
The struggle for the release of patents, and for the implementation of a massive vaccine production plan, must be financed by the non-payment of the foreign debt and a real tax on the profits of multinationals, banks and big capitalists, as we have been proposing from the FIT Unidad for Argentina, among other measures. This is the task that is set as an urgent need in the face of the catastrophe of the pandemic. The struggle to achieve mass vaccination is the struggle against the system itself, which supports its existence on private property, in this case, patents, threatening the health of all humanity.
That is why we welcome the campaign being promoted by various organizations such as Médecins Sans Frontières to ensure that “there are no medical patents and that vaccines, drugs and diagnoses for COVID-19 really reach everyone in the world”, calling on governments to exempt diagnose methods, treatments and vaccines from patents.
Fighting against patents for vaccines and drugs that are the heritage of humanity is a key task. Such was the case of the Salk vaccine against poliomyelitis and penicillin, whose inventors Jonas Salk and Alexander Fleming, respectively, did not patent said vaccines and drugs, or the cases of India and Brazil, which circumvented patents and were able to produce drugs to combat HIV/AIDS.
Because of the content of this struggle, which directly affects the foundations of the capitalist society, based on the private ownership of the means of production and the transformation of all social production into merchandise, it is up to the workers and their political and union organizations, struggle committees, etc., all over the world to take the initiative so that the patent laws are annulled, the laboratories are nationalized and a coordinated plan of production and distribution of vaccines and all the medical supplies necessary to confront the pandemic are established. In Argentina, the union bureaucracy operates in the opposite direction, since it is associated with the management of the social leftovers to the interests of private medicine and the big laboratories, while many of its leaders, such as Hugo Moyano and part of his family, scandalously entered the select group of privileged people who were inoculated with the “vip vaccines”.
A coalition of 99 countries led by India and South Africa has requested the World Trade Organization a waiver of intellectual property rights so that generic drug manufacturers can start producing vaccines. The same has been demanded by Médecins Sans Frontières, the renowned NGO Oxfam and Amnesty, among others. Although this is a limited proposal, which is explained by the ties of these same states to the general interests of capital, the Argentine government, signatory of this declaration, does nothing about it. On the contrary, it passed Act 27573 -with the absolute opposition of FIT Unidad-, to give impunity and immunity to multinationals and to waive local courts in case of lawsuits and disputes, a law passed by Peronism of the Frente de Todos and its allies, and the majority of the employers’ opposition of Juntos por el Cambio, that is to say, the legislators who answer to Macri, Larreta, Patricia Bullrich and Carrió.
President Alberto Fernandez said at the Davos Forum that vaccines should be a “global public good” but he has not even pronounced himself in favor of the elimination of the patent law. What’s more, the government says that the AstraZeneca vaccine is produced in Argentina, but in service of the Insud-Pharma Group[L1] (of the millionaire businessman Sigman) in agreement with the Mexican tycoon Carlos Slim.
In Argentina there are at least six projects underway to produce vaccines with little or no financing from the State, and part of the Oxford-Astra-Zeneca vaccines are already being produced in the mAxience laboratory (owned by the government-friendly tycoon Hugo Sigman), but the government has not even guaranteed that a large percentage of the latter will remain in the country, taking them to Mexico to be packaged. Humanity cannot be left to the discretion of a handful of companies whose only logic is to maximize their profits. It is necessary to fight for a plan of production and distribution of free vaccines for Argentina and the countries that need them, as well as the massive distribution of plasma, equine serum and all the necessary medicines to prevent avoidable deaths due to Covid-19, in the line of ignoring the right of patents and intellectual property, summoning the peoples of other nations to promote it jointly.
In this way, we promote and join the different initiatives aimed at mobilizing for this demand, calling for all economic, human, technological and infrastructural resources to be made available to achieve a large-scale production of the vaccine and palliative medicines, declaring them of public utility, including the intervention of foreign and national laboratories and private pharmaceutical companies, in order to have all the necessary supplies and technology under the control of the workers and users. To set up a universal vaccination plan, free of charge, to be part of the annual vaccination plan and to be able to advance towards collective immunity.
Together with this battle, we support a global and in-depth solution, which includes the definitive abolition of all patents and a single national healthcare system, nationalizing laboratories, the pharmaceutical industry and private medicine, placing them under the control and management of their workers in order to put an end to the capitalist business of healthcare and thus be able to guarantee the working people the enjoyment of public, universal, free and excellent healthcare, that is, to put an end to the regime that imposes this pressing situation on humanity.
In this context, we call for a common struggle with all those who protest against patents, for free vaccines for all and a global emergency plan with freedom of production in each country. Calling for the broadest unity to promote it, denouncing the big pharmaceutical multinationals and laboratories that negotiate with the pressing need of millions.
We call to achieve thousands of statements and to promote different initiatives, protests and mobilizations for this purpose, promoting a large movement, coordinating with internal groups, delegate bodies and unions and various workers’, popular and human rights organizations, personalities, leftist parties, social, student and women’s organizations, also promoting international coordination initiatives for this purpose.
Frente de Izquierda Unidad
MST, PTS, PO and IS
