Big Pharma is still making absurd profits off of the pandemic

Pfizer is projected to rake in more than $50 billion from its COVID medicines this year. It’s a symbol of the drastic inequality created by a for-profit approach to global health.

by Nick Dearden

Part 3 - The Art of Intellectual Property

The monopolies that Pfizer enjoys are hardwired into the rules of the global economy. In the 1980s a handful of corporations, led by a former Pfizer chief executive, recognized that their most important assets were not their factories, their workforces, or even their research base. Rather it was the intellectual property that they sat on — the patents, the know-how, the trademarks. They set about persuading the US government to ensure this intellectual property was as well protected as possible, and in the mid-1990s US-style patents laws were embedded in the newly formed World Trade Organization as a global minimum, undermining the sort of sharing, copying, and imitation of technology that had allowed countries like South Korea to go from poverty to an advanced economy in a generation.

High protection for intellectual property was supposed to encourage innovation and reward the risky business of researching medical breakthroughs. It has had quite the opposite effect. Rather, Big Pharma companies slashed their research and development budgets and focused on buying up research, much of it publicly created, so they could sit on the intellectual property attached to it for decades. A STAT analysis in 2018 concluded that Pfizer developed only a fraction — about 23 percent — of its drugs in-house. Even the research these companies do undertake is often taken up in trying to prolong the lifetime of patents, by making insignificant changes to drugs they already own.

In this way, these firms have become more like hedge funds than research facilities, committed to squeezing every last drop of profit out of their intellectual property. This is great news for Pfizer’s superrich investors.

Last week the company proudly announced that during just the first three months of 2022, it has returned $4.2 billion directly to shareholders. Between 2016 and 2020, the figure was around $70 billion — far exceeding the company’s research budget and even exceeding its net income. Pfizer’s CEO, Albert Bourla, boasted that Pfizer was the “most efficient machine to convert raw materials to doses.” It would be more accurate to describe the company as the most efficient machine for converting public resources into shareholder wealth.

Source, links:

https://jacobinmag.com/2022/05/pharmaceutical-industry-pfizer-covid-vaccines-patents

[1][2][4]

Comments

How The CIA & Mossad Set Up Sudan for Genocide since the 1990s

MintPress News Sudan is being systematically destroyed - not by accident, but by design. This investigation reveals how US imperialism, through Israeli and UAE proxies, has engineered Sudan's collapse since the 1990s to crush the axis of resistance, block China's Belt and Road, and loot Africa's resources families are killed, children starve, and the west profits.

Capitalism & Genocide - Yanis Varoufakis Speech at the Gaza Tribunal, 23rd October 2025, Istanbul

Yanis Varoufakis On 23rd October, Yanis Varoufakis testified in front of the Jury of Conscience in the context of the Gaza Tribunal. His speech focused on the economic forces underpinning the genocide of the Palestinian people. In particular, he spoke on the manner in which capitalist dynamics have historically fuelled the white settler colonial project and, more recently, how the accumulation of a new form of capital - which he calls cloud capital - has accelerated, deepened and amplified the economic forces powering and propelling the machinery of genocide.

Trump Welcomes Syrian Leader & “REFORMED” TERRORIST To White House!

The Jimmy Dore Show President Donald Trump is planning a White House welcome for Syria’s new president, former al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, who was installed after the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad. Jimmy Dore argues that the U.S. and its allies, including Israel, have long funded extremist groups such as ISIS and al-Qaeda to serve foreign policy interests in the Middle East, so the embrace of al-Sharaa makes sense, even if it might confuse anyone who thought we took seriously the so-called “War on Terror.” He and Americans’ Comedian Kurt Metzger contrast Trump’s willingness to meet with alleged terrorists to his refusal to engage in dialogue with leaders like Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, accusing U.S. policy of hypocrisy and imperialism.

Trump BLEW IT: Israel, Candace Owens & Epstein BURY MAGA (But Not How You Think)

Danny Haiphong Trump has bent the knee to Israel for the last time. Patrick Henningsen exposes his horrid record and all the elements that has led to his rapidly coming collapse.

Greece, Palestine & Zionism: FPTV Reports from Athens

Free Palestine TV Laith Marouf & Rabih Ghannam travel to Athens, Greece, and take a walking tour with local activists Evan Katsounis and Maria Kosmidi, to discover the rich history of anti-Zionist and anti-Fascist actions in the city, as well as the current Zionist incursion into the property sector and the counter actions directed at the presence of these War Criminals on the streets of the city.

Zionists’ LONG HISTORY Of False Flags & STAGED Attacks!

The Jimmy Dore Show In recent years several alleged anti-Semitic incidents, including graffiti and vandalism, were later revealed to have been staged or “false flag” operations carried out by Jewish perpetrators to create sympathy or shift the public narrative in Israel’s favor. Jimmy Dore presents investigations that revealed hoaxes and uses them to argue that media and political institutions exploit victimhood to silence criticism of Israel. He then expands the discussion to accuse Israeli and Zionist figures of deceit in global politics and misinformation about Gaza. It ends with commentary that the term “anti‑Semitic” has lost meaning due to its politicization and misuse.

Will Mamdani manage to liberate New York from brutal neoliberalism?

globinfo freexchange Fifty years ago, New York City was on the verge of collapse . The politicians who run the city had borrowed more and more money from the banks to pay for its growing services and welfare. But in the early 70s, the middle classes fled from the city and the taxes they paid disappeared with them. So, the banks lent the city even more. But then, they began to worry about the size of the growing debt and whether the city would ever be able to pay it back. And then, one day in 1975, the banks just stopped. The city held its regular meeting to issue bonds in return for the loans, overseen by the city's financial controller. The banks were supposed to turn up at 11 a.m., but it soon became clear that none of them were going to appear. The meeting was rescheduled for 2 p.m. and the banks promised they would turn up. What happened that day in New York, marked a radical shift in power. The banks insisted that in order to protect their loans, they sho...

The Rise of the Thielverse & the Surveillance State

The Chris Hedges YouTube Channel Whitney Webb traces the Thielverse’s rise and the construction of the bipartisan modern surveillance state that Trump and his benefactors are deploying against dissidents and immigrants today.

A response to misinformation on Nicaragua: it was a coup, not a ‘massacre’

There is so much misinformation in mainstream corporate media about recent events in Nicaragua that it is a pity that Mary Ellsberg’s article for Pulse has added to it with a seemingly leftish critique. Ellsberg claims that recent articles, including from this website, often “ paint a picture of the crisis in Nicaragua that is dangerously misleading. ” Unfortunately, her own article does just that. It looks at the situation entirely from the perspective of those opposing Daniel Ortega’s government while whitewashing their malevolent behavior and downplaying the levels of US support they have relied on. Her piece is an incomplete depiction of what is happening on the ground, ignoring many salient facts that have come to light and which have been outdated by recent events. The following is a brief response to Ellsberg’s main points from someone who lives in Nicaragua and has observed the situation directly and intimately: https://grayzoneproject.com/2018/08/15/a-res...

Priceless: Zelensky told the truth about the war in Ukraine at its beginning!

globinfo freexchange How did this escape the radars of mainstream media? Well, the answer is obvious, yet still, it is astonishing the fact that already back in 2022, at the beginning of the war in Ukraine, one of the major outlets of Western imperialism, actually translated this part of the interview with West's puppet, Volodymyr Zelensky. At 12:28 of the video, Zelensky starts spelling the truth about the real reason behind the war in Ukraine! Zelensky admits: There are those in the West who don't mind a long war because it would mean exhausting Russia, even if this means the demise of Ukraine and the cost of Ukrainian lives. This is definitely in the interest of some countries. For other countries, it would be better if the war ended quickly because Russia's market is big one that their economies are su...

the unbalanced evolution of homo sapiens

Search This Blog