Total number of COVID-19 cases reported to WHO January 5, 2020 to May 19, 2024
World 775,522,000
Canada 4,800,000
Courtesy WHO Dashboard

By Dian Cohen

Local Journalism Initiative

We humans are hard-wired to react to immediate threats. So we’ll jump if a speeding car is coming at us or an angry T-Rex is about to pounce. It’s not that we can’t plan for other less immediate threats: we can take an umbrella in the morning if it looks like rain by the end of the day. We can open a savings account that automatically gets a percentage of our paycheque. Our problem is that we aren’t good at hanging onto ideas once the threat has passed.

When the pandemic had us all spooked in 2021, when four million people had already died and were dying at the rate of 100,000 a month, all 194 member countries of the World Health Organization agreed to negotiate a global treaty that would govern their behavior ‘next time’ to make the next health emergency less deadly and disruptive than COVID-19 was.

Cut to today. The pandemic has waned – the immediate threat is gone. The whole world reported only 1,867 deaths in the 28 days ended May 19, 2024. Canada was a hotspot, reporting 30 deaths, although in a country of 40 million, it didn’t make many headlines. So maybe it’s understandable that when the World Health Assembly opened its 77^th meeting in Geneva last month, the first announcement was that there was no agreed upon global accord. The high- middle- and low-income countries of the world couldn’t agree on how to share relevant knowledge and technology nor how to produce and distribute vaccines, tests and treatments.

A look at how the market economy works provides the answer to why the global accord never happened. Pharmaceutical companies are in business to make money by developing products that solve medical problems. They can spend tens or even hundreds of millions doing so. Legislation gives them several years’ monopoly on their products so that when they’re successful, they can charge buyers enough to get their development money back and pay dividends to their shareholders and reward their executives.

When COVID was declared a pandemic, scientists all over the world shared their research, otherwise known as intellectual property, freely and urgently. That’s how safe, effective vaccines were developed so quickly. But in this case, the money to develop the vaccines came from governments around the world – estimates are that the US, UK, Germany and others publicly funded (read taxpayer-funded) tens of billions of dollars to help scientists do their work. Moderna, BioNTech and Pfizer turned out to be the winners. At the height of the pandemic, it was assumed that they would share the vaccine technology and know-how with the WHO so that vaccines could be manufactured around the world. That didn’t happen. No restrictions were put on their monopolies over pricing and distributing their vaccines.

All three companies made billions by charging multiple times the cost of production and selling almost all their vaccines to rich countries. Kim Campbell was one of many former heads of state or Nobel Prize winners imploring western governments in 2021 to lift the monopoly protection on COVID vaccines. To no avail.

That’s pretty much the whole story. The sticking points that shot down the global accord were the high income countries’ refusal to share with the low-and middle-income countries their intellectual property and manufacturing rights. The WHO has given their members another year to come to an agreement. It’s not going to happen without some consideration of how a market economy, driven by profit and protected by legislation, works.

Meanwhile, the World Assembly and its 2,000+ delegates proceeded to the week-long meeting at hand, “All for Health, Health for All.” Canada is one of 17 countries championing a resolution entitled “Economics of health for all”. The vision is captured in a 90 second info-clip:  “What if we could design an economy that would prioritize the health of all people and the planet we live on? Where … health is seen not as an additional cost or potential budget cut, but as a necessary investment for our future. A world in which health innovations are shared for the common good, so that everyone can access the health care they need and where governments have the capacity and resources to drive these changes.” In other words, to infuse capitalism with more public interest than private gain.

This resolution has passed, and with it, a mandate to the Assembly to complete a ‘how-to’ manual to transform the world’s economies and report on it at the 79^th World Health Assembly in 2026.

The info-clip ends with an inspirational, “the question is not why should we, but what’s holding us back?” The answer to that question is chronicled in our past behavior. Even with the COVID  pandemic raging, we couldn’t agree to share vaccines. Neither did we share 30 years ago when the HIV/AIDS pandemic was raging.

You be the judge of the likelihood of a pandemic accord within the year and/or agreement among all of the 194 member nations that their economy should be built around health and well-being rather than command and control, the market, or whatever else it’s built around now. Humans not only find it difficult to hang onto ideas, but we’re also fundamentally irrational — reasoning, choice, and problem solving are often overwhelmed by fallacies, illusions, biases, and other shortcomings. Vaccine hesitancy and conspiracy mentality are but two more recent illustrations. A more long-standing one related to the economy is ‘the backfire effect’. It describes how we continue to hold onto established beliefs even when faced with clear, contradictory evidence.

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