Thursday, July 2, 2020
Pandemic profiteering: Gliead Sciences cashes in on COVID-19
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/07/01/pers-j01.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws
1 July 2020
Pharmaceutical giant Gilead Sciences announced Monday that it will charge $3,120 for a five-day course of its coronavirus therapeutic remdesivir for the vast majority of the US population, including those on Medicare and Medicaid. A single vial of remdesivir, containing a tenth of a gram of the drug, will cost $520, a hundred times more expensive than its weight in gold.
This is nothing less than the extortion of the American public amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The price is estimated to be 400 times higher than what the drug needs to be profitable. Gilead is expected to make $1.3 billion from private payers by the end of the year.
Gilead’s announcement sends a clear message: American pharmaceutical companies plan to make billions off the COVID-19 pandemic, which has infected more than 10.5 million people and killed at least 513,000 worldwide. Notably, Wall Street surged 800 points over the past two days on the news.
The revulsion felt toward Gilead in the aftermath of its press release was put most forcefully by AIDS Health Foundation President Michael Weinstein. “Gilead Sciences unmasked itself today as both a war profiteer and greedy bastards—a depressing feat and spectacularly tone-deaf response to a global pandemic that has so far killed over half-a-million people worldwide, including more than 120,000 deaths in the US.”
In an attempt to justify the company’s price-gouging, Gilead Chairman and CEO Daniel O’Day released an open letter. Basing himself on data that was preliminary and not statistically significant, O’Day claimed that remdesivir “shortened time to recovery by an average of four days,” which, according to him, saves hospitals “approximately $12,000 per patient.”
The company’s executives thus generously “decided to price remdesivir well below this value." He continued, "To ensure broad and equitable access at a time of urgent global need, we have set a price… which equates to $2,340 per patient.” In O’Day’s opinion, this would allow “all patients [to] have access” to the therapeutic and balance the firm’s “longer-term responsibilities.”
The letter does not spell out what these “longer-term responsibilities” are, but they are not toward coronavirus patients. A report from the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review shows that the raw materials needed to make remdesivir cost only about $10 for a ten-day treatment, and the therapeutic has been priced at $600 by generic producers in Bangladesh and India, a quarter of the “broad and equitable” price boasted of by O’Day.
Moreover, while the cost of the therapeutic will be borne by their insurance for many millions in the United States, many millions more depend on the CARES Act funding for coronavirus treatments. They will have few options once that money pool runs dry, especially as even before the pandemic hit nearly 40 percent of the population was unable to afford an emergency $400 expense, much less one that is six or eight times that amount.
In a rational world, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Alex Azar would have demanded that Gilead end its blatant price-gouging immediately. Instead, he hailed the drug as “life-saving” and pledged HHS to buy up to $1.56 billion worth of the drug.
Azar himself has many ties to the pharmaceutical industry. He was the president of the major drug enterprise Eli Lilly and Company before being tapped to be US President Donald Trump’s HHS secretary. He was also a director of the lobbying group Biotechnology Innovation Organization. He has been denounced by whistleblower Rick Bright, the ousted director of the government agency overseeing the development of a coronavirus vaccine, for seeking to downplay the pandemic when it first emerged in China in December and January.
It is also unclear whether remdesivir is actually effective in treating the novel coronavirus. Gilead had tested the efficacy of the remedy against the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) coronaviruses, which led the company to suspect it might work against the pandemic virus, SARS-CoV-2. Doctors in China began treating patients with it in January.
Since then, medical studies on remdesivir’s effectiveness in treating COVID-19 have shown that it does not significantly reduce the death rate for those with the disease. Research by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in March and April concluded that, “given high mortality despite the use of remdesivir, it is clear that treatment with an antiviral drug alone is not likely to be sufficient.” In that context, billions of dollars are being spent to acquire a drug that, by the science available, doesn’t work.
The research did not stop National Institute of Allergey and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Anthony Fauci from declaring, when the preliminary results were released: “The data shows that remdesivir has a clear-cut, significant positive effect in diminishing the time to recovery… We think it is opening the door to the fact that we now have the capability of treating [the coronavirus].”
Fauci’s support helped drive Gilead’s stock to new heights. Since the beginning of the year, the company’s market capitalization has increased by $20.1 billion to $96.5 billion, largely by promoting remdesivir as an effective treatment for the pandemic. This mirrors the fortunes of drugmaker Moderna, which has grown by more than 200 percent to a net worth of nearly $25 billion after proclaiming work on its own vaccine.
Moderna board member Moncef Slaoui, tapped by Trump to head the government’s “warp speed” vaccine development drive, became $2.4 million richer as a result of the media frenzy surrounding the announcement that Moderna had made progress toward a vaccine.
Beyond pumping up the share prices of the pharmaceutical giants, the media has promoted remdesevir and Moderna’s vaccine as “miracle drugs” to boost the campaign to get workers back on the job in factories and workplaces that have been hotbeds of COVID-19.
Wall Street sees the pandemic as a potential profit bonanza. The big banks and major corporations have received at least $6 trillion since March in bailouts and are going to make billions more holding the American and world population hostage by overcharging for potentially lifesaving coronavirus treatments.
Gilead is only one example of the lawlessness of corporate enterprises in the United States. The recent past has seen the poisoning of Flint, two Boeing 737 Max crashes, the opioid epidemic fueled by the pharmaceutical giants and the California wildfires caused by PG&E. No executive has ever gone to jail for these crimes. As Barack Obama’s attorney general told Congress in 2013, these modern-day robber barons are “too big to jail.”
The disastrous response of American capitalism to the COVID-19 pandemic makes clear the need to put an end to capitalism and the subjugation of human health to private profit. This means mobilizing the entire working class to expropriate the pharmaceutical giants and every major industry and transform these monopolies into publicly-owned and democratically-controlled utilities. The dictatorship of corporate interests over the working class must be abolished and economic life must be placed in the hands of the workers themselves.
Bryan Dyne
Local Unions Defy AFL-CIO in Push to Oust Police Unions
Several local unions have moved to oust police unions, despite the federation's approach that collective bargaining can be used for police reform.
June 30, 2020 Rebecca Rainey and Holly Otterbein POLTICO
https://portside.org/2020-06-30/local-unions-defy-afl-cio-push-oust-police-unions
The nation’s labor movement is splitting over police reform in the wake of George Floyd’s death.
Local unions are defying leaders of the AFL-CIO, who have rejected calls to cut ties with the labor federation's law enforcement arm and stressed the importance of collective bargaining instead to counter the use of excessive force. Several local unions, including those affiliated with the AFL-CIO, have moved to oust police unions within their locals and remove officers from schools and other workplaces. They argue that police have used their bargaining power to resist reform and protect those who have killed unarmed African Americans.
The vastly different approaches to solving what has become a major election year issue have not only exposed the rift within the labor movement but also threaten to diminish law enforcement unions in liberal cities and could even affect the behind-the-scenes race to succeed AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka.
“There are a lot of unions that are very concerned about police brutality,” said Lowell Peterson, executive director of Writers Guild of America-East, which adopted a resolution calling on the AFL-CIO to disassociate itself from the International Union of Police Associations, the federation’s police union affiliate. “There’s definitely a lot of talk in the labor movement about, ‘Why is this happening and what can we as unions do about it?’”
The nation’s second-largest teachers’ union, United Teachers Los Angeles, last week voted to eliminate police in Los Angeles public schools and “redirect funding to mental health and counseling” for students. The Chicago school board voted down a similar measure to cancel a $33 million contract with city police that was backed by the Chicago Teachers’ Union in protests and rallies throughout the week.
The Martin Luther King County Labor Council, a body of labor organizations representing more than 100,000 workers in the Seattle area, voted to expel the Seattle Police Officers Guild earlier this month. The Association of Flight Attendants, which sits on the AFL-CIO’s executive council, passed a resolution demanding that police unions embrace change “or be removed from the labor movement.”
Even the leader of the Service Employees International Union, the second largest union in the country, which itself represents some law enforcement employees, has expressed openness to the idea of ejecting police unions from the movement, though she has stopped short of endorsing the move.
“That's an option,” said SEIU President Mary Kay Henry of the Seattle federation’s decision to oust the police union. "I think another option is to use the union structure and leadership to educate and engage every member” in “re-imagining policing and criminal justice."
That would have been unheard of just months ago — and demonstrates how much has changed since Floyd’s death at the hands of a Minneapolis cop sparked nationwide protests against police brutality.
While labor activists say it is unlikely that Trumka would ever support efforts to expel law enforcement unions from the labor movement, the push from locals and some national unions to ostracize the police, as well as the larger Black Lives Matter movement, could drive more modest change.
Police unions have fought back, saying that no one forced local governments to sign collective bargaining agreements that contain provisions protecting police and warning that attacks on law enforcement unions are part of a pattern of going after organized labor.
“No contract is rammed down the throat of a city or jurisdiction. They signed it, they negotiated it, they agreed to it,” said Jim Pasco, executive director of the National Fraternal Order of Police.
Sam Cabral, the president of the International Union of Police Associations, slammed Trumka’s response to the unrest, writing in a June 12 letter that the federation's comments regarding America’s “history of racism and police violence against black people” were “inflammatory and patently false.” Cabral said he wouldn’t be willing to sit down with those who “have already indicted” law enforcement “based on one horrible incident.”
California’s largest police unions ran an ad in the Washington Post earlier this month calling for a national use of force standard, misconduct registry and “ongoing and frequent” training. Trumka also wrote in a recent op-ed that the labor movement is calling on Congress to adopt reforms including a chokehold ban and demilitarization.
Still, AFL-CIO leaders have maintained that the best way for the group to address the issue of police brutality is to “engage” its affiliates “rather than isolate them.”
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, an affiliate of the federation, said many members of the movement believe it’s important to have a conversation with police unions, “to the extent that they were willing to have it, for them to change and for us to change the criminal justice system.”
At the same time, the AFT recently passed a resolution calling to remove police from schools and instead train security personnel as “peace officers.”
Part of the solution, SEIU’s Henry suggested, is changing police collective bargaining practices.
“The role of the labor movement is to be a vehicle for the structural change that the Movement for Black Lives is demanding in policing and criminal justice all over this country,” she said.
Some progressives say those collective bargaining agreements often help shield officers accused of misconduct.
Dozens of city police departments, including in Minneapolis, have added provisions to their contracts that delay officer interrogations after suspected misconduct, according to a 2017 study. Agreements with police agencies in Austin, Baltimore, Chicago and Washington, D.C., have included language that mandated the removal of disciplinary records from personnel files over time.
As more local unions choose to step away or distance themselves from the police, the pressure to break with law enforcement unions has generated an internal debate over the issue within the AFL-CIO executive council itself in recent weeks.
Color of Change, a racial justice organization, said it has discussed the possibility of ejecting police unions with at least five labor groups in the AFL-CIO.
Weingarten said “a couple members of the council raised it” during a three-day meeting in June. In a call earlier this month, American Postal Workers Union leader Mark Dimondstein brought up the matter, according to a person on the line.
The federation’s general board released several recommendations on June 9 for affiliate unions to address police violence but declined to drop the International Union of Police Associations as requested by the WGAE.
The debate could affect the quiet race to succeed Trumka, who is expected to step aside. The election won’t be held until the federation’s convention in October 2021, but Flight Attendants union president Sara Nelson, whose organization has taken one of the most progressive stands on the question, and AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer Liz Shuler are both rumored to be interested in taking the role.
In June, Nelson publicly accused AFL-CIO leadership of misleadingly attributing a statement opposing the ouster of the IUPA to the entire general board.
“To be clear, this issue was not discussed by the General Board today and there was no vote on the resolution put forward by WGAE,” she tweeted. “Also, collective bargaining empowers workers; it is not a means to oppress workers’ rights.
Tim Schlittner, the AFL-CIO's communications director, disputed the claim. He said Trumka referred to the WGA-East’s resolution but that no one offered a motion on it.
The labor movement has successfully ousted unions in the past that didn’t abide by its principles. The Congress of Industrial Organizations expelled 11 member unions around 1950 due to their alleged links to the Community Party. The AFL-CIO also cut ties with three unions in 1957 over corrupt behavior. And throughout the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and ’60s, the AFT moved to expel local unions that were racially segregated.
Police unions, meanwhile, insist that any efforts to oust them will blow back on all of labor.
“Those who are looking to kick police officers out of the union movement should be very careful," said Patrick Lynch, president of the Police Benevolent Association of New York. "The rhetoric that they are using now is the same rhetoric that has been used to strip union protections from teachers, bus drivers, nurses and other civil servants across this country."
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