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At a recent
virtual gathering of parents and faculty at my children’s
school, one parent who is a teacher and therefore eligible to receive
a COVID-19 vaccine mentioned that she got her first Pfizer shot at a
local pharmacy, and when she asked about a leftover dose that could
be given to her husband rather than thrown away, her husband got
lucky. The rest of us parents eagerly took down the drug store’s
information and called about leftover doses after the meeting. Better
for the vaccines to be dispensed than thrown into the trash, was our
logic. But the pharmacist, perhaps tired of being hounded about extra
doses, informed us they would no longer give them out to those who
weren’t currently eligible.
It’s the
vaccine Hunger Games. Or, as the creator of the Minneapolis Vaccine
Hunter Facebook group told the New
York Times,
“It’s like buying Bruce Springsteen tickets.”
In the private
Los Angeles Vaccine Hunter Facebook group in which I lurked for a few
days, both as a bona fide member and as a journalist, I observed
Southern Californians sharing tips about how to obtain leftover doses
at Kedren
Community Health Center in South Los Angeles,
a private clinic serving a vulnerable community. Vaccine hunters
reminded one another to be polite and considerate to the community
they obviously did not hail from, and some even said they made a
donation after getting their shots. Obtaining leftover doses requires
standing in a separate line, sometimes for hours, with no guarantee
of getting a vaccine. Many fear being judged.
There
is shame and blame all around. There are accusations that those who
are privileged are cutting ahead of others. There is disappointment
and unfairness. In January, journalists like me were included in an
early “tier” of eligibility in California, classified as
essential workers under “Communications and IT.” As a
daily television and radio show host, I am required to come into
contact with at least one staff member daily. News reporting cannot
stop. And yet by February, the eligibility had disappeared as Los
Angeles County reconfigured its eligibility tiers.
In the
meantime, my husband, a work-from-home scientist, is classified as an
“educator” because he is employed by a university.
Although in-person classes will not resume until the fall on many
campuses, he and others like him are eligible to get the vaccine now
simply because county authorities decided so. As one vaccine hunter
asked on Facebook, why are we “letting the government dictate
who gets to live or die, and labeling who is essential and who is not
essential to society”?
And yet, even
for those who are eligible, finding a vaccine has turned into a blood
sport. The conservative Wall
Street Journal
recommends that elderly Americans who may not be tech-savvy should
simply “Recruit a College Kid with Tech Skills and Patience,”
to navigate the “bewildering field of online portals and
limited supplies.”
So far in
California, most of those who need vaccines the most have not
received them. According to the Associated
Press,
“African Americans have received 3% of vaccine doses while they
make up 6% of the state. Latinos, who make up 39% of the state, have
received 17% of doses.” Meanwhile, Republican-led states like
Texas
and Mississippi
are ending all quarantine and safety requirements, well before
vaccination rates are at safe levels.
Given the
extreme difficulty in obtaining a vaccine, authoritative exhortations
by officials “to
get a shot if it’s offered to you”
and to set aside any guilt about who deserves it and who is cutting
in line ignore the real problem: we live in a nation where health
care is considered an individual privilege by way of employment, not
a right. Health care in the United States is considered an industry
where profits are a critical priority over the delivery of care.
At the heart
of the desperate stampede to obtain vaccines is one simple dilemma:
there aren’t enough vaccines against COVID-19 being produced.
Variants
of the virus are developing faster
than nations are able to inoculate their populations, and plummeting
infection rates in the U.S. have now leveled
off.
Part
of the problem is that former President Donald Trump, who
quietly got vaccinated recently
and wants
all the credit
for vaccine development, last year turned
down the chance
to purchase additional Pfizer vaccines beyond the first 100 million
doses. After President Joe Biden threatened
to invoke the Defense Production Act
to force Pfizer and Moderna to produce more vaccines, the companies
agreed to sell more doses faster than had been agreed upon.
Also
showcasing that governments can indeed force private companies to do
what is needed, Biden more recently brokered
a deal
with the pharmaceutical company Merck to produce extra doses of a new
vaccine developed by Johnson & Johnson. Merck is being paid
handsomely with $268.8 million of taxpayer funds. Biden has also
invoked the Defense Production Act to help the company obtain the
supplies it needs. Had Trump last year used the might of the U.S.
government against these private companies, we might not be fighting
to sign up for vaccines today.
Pharmaceutical
companies, whose vaccines were funded by massive
public investments,
still refuse to share their intellectual property with the world. The
Open
COVID Pledge,
created by a group of academics and scientists to make virus-related
technology freely available, has urged corporations to prioritize
public health over profit. But notably absent from the pledge’s
list
of signatories
are Pfizer, BioNTech, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, and Merck.
The United
States and other nations where these pharmaceutical companies are
based could force them to share the life-saving information,
especially because doing so keeps all of us safe. Unless nations stop
all international travel across borders, hoarding vaccine technology
from the rest of the world will not help anyone. The old adage of “no
one is safe until everyone is safe” applies especially well to
the pandemic.
Journalists
with the Associated
Press
say they found three factories on three continents that could begin
manufacturing “hundreds of millions of COVID-19 vaccines on
short notice if only they had the blueprints and technical know-how,”
except that such “knowledge belongs to the large pharmaceutical
companies who have produced the first three vaccines.”
Instead
of blaming and shaming one another over the frustrating lack of
vaccine availability and the individual race to obtain it, Americans
ought to turn their gaze to the companies that are manufacturing the
products. Pfizer and Moderna have earned near-mythical status for the
life-saving vaccines, but it behooves us to remember that these
private entities were paid handsomely to do their job and cannot be
allowed to hold humanity hostage over their profits.
This article
was produced by Economy
for All,
a project of
the Independent Media Institute.
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