A vaccine against tuberculosis, the world’s deadliest infectious disease, has never been closer to reality, with the potential to save millions of lives. But its development slowed after its corporate owner focused on more profitable vaccines.
Ever since he was a medical student, Dr. Neil Martinson has confronted the horrors of tuberculosis, the world’s oldest and deadliest pandemic. For more than 30 years, patients have streamed into the South African clinics where he has worked — migrant workers, malnourished children and pregnant women with HIV — coughing up blood. Some were so emaciated, he could see their ribs. They’d breathed in the contagious bacteria from a cough on a crowded bus or in the homes of loved ones who didn’t know they had TB. Once infected, their best option was to spend months swallowing pills that often carried terrible side effects. Many died.
So, when Martinson joined a call in April 2018, he was anxious for the verdict about a tuberculosis vaccine he’d helped test on hundreds of people.
The results blew him away: The shot prevented over half of those infected from getting sick; it was the biggest TB vaccine breakthrough in a century. He hung up, excited, and waited for the next step, a trial that would determine whether the shot was safe and effective enough to sell.
Weeks passed. Then months.
this is a textbook example of why unrestrained capitalism doesnt work. You either need to hand everyone money or purposefully manipulate the financial incentives. Otherwise you get the basic “do you rich people want this?” distortion and we’re increasingly seeing how badly this distortion affects supplies of food, housing, etc.
Indeed. Unfortunately the tendency is for restrained capitalist systems to inch toward unrestrained oligopoly through greed leading to corruption and regulatory capture, absent eternal, aggressive vigilance.
It isn’t hard to see that the goal of profit maximization is incompatible with the goals for healthcare, food, housing, prison systems. And is also at odds with preserving the environment.
Money IS Power, and Power is something modern politics almost never talks about (though if you go look at older ideologies like Marxism, it was all the rage to talk about power).
So yeah, things will happen in certain ways, not just economically but at all levels, because those with lots of money use the power it gives them (which is insanelly more than what most other people have, since the curve of wealth distribution is pretty much an exponential one) to make things happen the way they want.
Once you look back at the whole system with an “old fashioned” prism of “where’s the power and what is being done with it” and with awareness of Money as a giver of Power, a lot of things suddenly look different: for example Neoliberalism, with its desire for a Small State that does not regulate, is trying to weaken the power of the State - which in Democracy is controlled by representatives of voters (ideally, but often not quite) elected in a system were all votes count the same (i.e. all voters have the same amount of Power) - desires the de facto weakenning of the power of the State, hence of the evenly distributed Power of the Vote, which leaves Money (with it’s hugelly uneven distribution) as the sole Power - in other words, Neoliberalism is an ideology to destroy Democracy, replacing with with an Oligarchy.
Mind you, there are lot of other vectors through which the Power Of Money subverts Democracy (such as the buying of politicians and the Press), but the realization that what 4 decades of Neoliberalism have been working towards is to change the system so that votes have little real power - de facto destroying what makes Democracy democratic and leaving voting as nothing more than a meaningless performance - explains A LOT of the problems we see nowadays in democratic nations, because Money has never been this close to be the one and only Power (even in the old days the Power of Money was second to the Power of The Monarch, though in the time of the Robber Barons in the US maybe it was a bit like now)
Interesting and very helpful framing. I suppose it’s been at the back of my mind but to call out power explicitly and analyze through that lens does indeed clear up quite a lot.
I only started thinking about it from this point of view maybe a year ago.
It’s both interesting and scary how almost nobody in modern politics seems to talk about politics as the pursuit of power, as if Democracy has transcended such things and yet governing, in Democracy or not, is nothing more than the exercising of Power.
It’s also an explanation for most people’s pursuit of Money: even the most basic objective of getting enough money to be able to live as you want is about Freedom, or in other words Power over ones’ own destiny.
Food for thought.