As of March 30, over 60 countries had not received a single dose of vaccine, and many are not on track to be fully vaccinated before 2024 (New York Times, 3/30). Even as thousands of workers die daily from coronavirus, capitalism sees the vaccine as another vehicle for racist profits and a weapon in inter-imperialist rivalry between the U.S. and Chinese imperialists.
In wealthy countries, vaccine apartheid is apparent. The U.S. has vaccinated white people  at 2.5 times the rate for Latin and 2 times that of Black workers (KFF.org, 3/17). Israel has fully vaccinated over 50 percent of the Jewish population and is denying vaccines to the 4.5 million Palestinians under its military occupation. Capitalism will always see the lives of the working class as expendable. We must fight for communist revolution to build a society that serves the needs of the working class.
Vaccines for profit let workers die
UNICEF estimates that the world has the capacity to produce up to 20 billion doses of vaccine, and half of this capacity is in poorer countries. However, new vaccines are protected by patent laws that prevent manufacturing of the available vaccines without the permission of the pharmaceutical companies that own the patents (The Conversation, 2/18). Although there is worldwide pressure to suspend these intellectual property barriers, five wealthy countries, including the U.S. and Britain, have refused to do so. They are determined to guarantee the profits of big pharma, despite the fact that vaccine makers received about $20 billion dollars in public support.
“Residents of wealthy and middle-income countries have received about 90 percent of the nearly 400 million vaccines delivered so far. Under current projections, many of the rest [of the countries] will have to wait years” (NY Times, 3/21). Pfizer is demanding unprecedented liability protection from foreign countries in order to sell them vaccines, demanding it not be held responsible for rare adverse effects or for its own acts of negligence, fraud or malice. They are requiring that South American bosses put up huge assets, such as federal bank reserves, embassy buildings and military bases, as insurance against the cost of any future legal cases.
Although nine countries have been forced to agree to this sort of deal, five—Uruguay, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Cuba—have yet to receive a single dose of a foreign vaccine (nakedcapitalism.com, 3/21).
Vaccines become the new blood money
China’s bosses are winning the vaccine war as they have become the main sources of vaccines to Africa, Asia and South America, increasing their ever-growing imperialist influence in these areas. They are forcing the smaller capitalists to do their bidding along the way. The Brazilian ruling class was forced to accept the Chinese bosses Huawei as their 5G developer in order to get vaccines and the working class in Paraguay has been denied the vaccine even as deaths rise because the Paraguayan bosses are in bed with the Taiwanese capitalists.
China is extorting poor countries as workers die, while the U.S. ruling class is battling itself over how to respond. Torn between outright greed and giving up some of their profits to keep up with the Chinese imperialists, the U.S. ruling class has mostly been paralyzed. Though, in a horrifically racist use of the vaccine, Joe Biden offered 1.5 million doses to the Mexican ruling class in exchange for the Mexican bosses sending troops to the border with Guatemala to stop workers from Central America headed to the U.S. (NY Times, 3/18). The perversion of the vaccine being used to pay for troops to attack workers risking their lives to get poverty wage jobs in the U.S. is a damning example of the utter inability of capitalism to serve the needs of our class.
In a communist world, vaccines would be produced, manufactured and distributed collaboratively by the world’s scientists and factories. There would also be far fewer pandemics if production and mining were designed to prevent infection by wild viruses. Workers’ health would be a priority, so that we would also be better able to survive those infectious illnesses that do occur. Only such a revolutionary transition of society with the death of the profit motive can truly protect the working class.