THE THIRD WORLD IS FULL OF SLOW LEARNERS.

Among John Galt's denunciations of the Establishment of his era is this: "When some bum in some pesthole of Asia screams, 'How dare you be rich?' you apologize and promise to give it all away."  It's dystopian fiction, and yet, you can regularly find the same sort of foolishness in Common Dreams.

With patents for Covid-19 vaccines under private control, adds Global Justice Now policy advisor Heidi Chow, Big Pharma’s power players get to decide “who gets the vaccine and at what price.”

And so we now have some promising vaccines but no global gameplan for assuring every person on Earth ready and timely access to a future sans Covid. Millions more of us will suffer while a fortunate few of us make multiple billions. We can do better, and advocacy groups like Global Justice Now are organizing to make that better happen.

Some 78 percent of Moderna’s vaccine doses, Global Justice Now points out, has already been sold to rich nations with only 12 percent of the world’s population.

“In this global health emergency, vaccines should be available to all, everywhere, free of charge,” says a new Global Justice Now campaign for Covid-19 justice. “Manufacturers should be working together to produce enough doses for everyone, distributed in order of need. And companies and governments should be cooperating through the World Health Organization to make this happen.”

That's Sam Pizzigati, and it's likely you can find brain-brothers of his elsewhere on Common Dreams, or The Nation, or The Progressive, or featured on public radio.

What has it been, four millennia since the invention of commercial record-keeping?  At least two millennia since people figured out how to smelt and steel iron?  Five centuries since double-entry bookkeeping and insurance contracts emerged?  Twelve score and ten years or so since the Scottish Enlightenment (and Mozart and Haydn)?  You want global justice?  All the ideas I just enumerated are freely available, although "all you have to do is implement them" suffers from the same flaw as any "all you have to do" argument, namely, that would be the end of a platform for Mr Pizzigati or any of the area-studies hustlers who want the fruits of an advanced society without the supposed oppression, and that would be the end of power for the kind of politician or tyrant who benefits by the continued misery of his subjects.

Never mind any of that, though.  Common Dreams is a platform for people who still cling to their notions of One Best Way.

While individual companies across the world scramble to develop a vaccine, one would think these companies and governments would be able to come together to stem the spread of a virus that threatens us all. Instead, what we see is all of these social efforts, investments, and experiments done in an uncoordinated and uncollaborative manner. For these large companies, what matters first and foremost is the value of their shares. So it is important for them to show that they are “first” with a vaccine — even before having robust results. The premature release of “positive” data also means many governments will run to buy a vaccine without guarantees of its safety or efficacy.

The race among private pharmaceutical corporations for larger portions of the market also furthers the well-founded distrust among the general public and healthcare workers of vaccines that are being rushed because of competition. Healthcare workers are considered high risk and will be among the first to receive the novel vaccines under emergency approvals, but many doctors and nurses want more data before being exposed. The capitalists are reluctant to go into new lockdowns and even less likely to provide safety measures that will reduce the number of cases. Rather than forego profits, they prefer to expose hundreds of millions to vaccines that haven’t been fully tested.

Never mind that a coronavirus vaccine cartel might be more profitable to the laboratories as well as more hazardous to the health of the doctors and nurses.  That supposedly wasteful competition spreads the risk, in that the laboratory winning the race with a defective product is out of the running for use in the general population.  If the cartel-approved One Best Shot is a failure, we're all screwed, to use a technical term.  It's more likely that health care workers in Russia or China are going to be screwed.  Never mind all that, the illusion of The Best and The Brightest coming up with the One Best Way dies hard in some people.

The capitalists are touting vaccine development as an example of the merits of innovation. In reality, though, the global vaccine race has exposed the falsehood of some of the most closely held beliefs of the capitalist elite. These include the idea that capitalism “raises all boats” and “stimulates innovation.” As we have seen, rather than coordinating and sharing the results of scientific research, each multinational company is working on its own, in complete secrecy. Companies are wasting resources on duplicate research and taking much longer to find a vaccine. Imagine if the world’s great scientific minds all collaborated to develop the best possible vaccine in the shortest possible time. It is not hyperbole to say we would likely already have a vaccine saving lives.

I wonder if either of the authors, Mike Pappas and Luigi Morris ever participated in a multi-authored research project.  The reality of "the world's greatest scientific minds" collaborating is not necessarily consensus on One Formula with the Best Possible Outcome: like the Manhattan Project, it might be two different kinds of fission bombs, or there might be so much niggling over what Platonic perfection looks like that the Common Dreams types would still be slagging on the Trump presidency for delaying the rollout of the vaccine.  That's a minor but important point: this collaborative action has to be organized by somebody, and that might be Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin.  Never mind that, though, it's an opportunity to peddle the same sort of wishful thinking today that it was a hundred years ago.  "We need to eliminate competition and unite research and development efforts across borders. It is imperative to produce a generic, safe, and effective vaccine available for every country immediately at no cost. We need to nationalize the healthcare system and all vaccine-related industries under workers’ control."

No, no, no.  Let Matthew Continetti explain.

The Centers for Disease Control insisted that it coordinate national testing and community surveillance. Disaster ensued when the CDC’s test was revealed as flawed. The FDA was no better. According to [New York's] Times, it “enforced regulations that paradoxically made it tougher for hospitals, private clinics, and companies to deploy diagnostic tests in an emergency.” The nation’s political leaders were distracted from the crisis. Or they dismissed it. In any case, government failure made this pandemic worse.

The contrast with Operation Warp Speed could not be more pronounced. Earlier this year, the command-and-control, centralized, uniform, bureaucratic-regulatory approach to policymaking was dominant. The result was the “lost month.” It exacted a horrible human toll. With Operation Warp Speed, however, government lessened regulation. Policymakers reduced bureaucracy. They embraced experimentation and decentralization. They did what public officials do best: throw money at a problem. And now we have a vaccine.

Sorry, arguing that the bureaucrats of the Centers for Disease Control are capitalist bureaucrats, and we'd have better bureaucrats under workers' control just won't convince.

Tyler Cowen also weighs in.  There's an element of risk to a new vaccine, but there are ways of evaluating the risk.

Yet distributing the vaccines in geographically concentrated fashion would create some natural experiments and generate information of national value. For instance, if almost everyone in an area is vaccinated, the nation will have a better sense of how demand for flu shots, dental visits, home schooling and many other services will change in post-Covid America. If it turns out that there are unexpected side effects to the vaccine, they will become obvious more quickly, as local doctors would be inundated with a particular kind of complaint.

To extend: with multiple contending vaccines, early and limited discoveries of different difficulties, and different responses among populations, allows the manufacturers to recall and redesign their products, whilst the authorities can reallocate vaccines among the populations having better experiences with one variant or another.  Rush to a single, universally excessive vaccine, as Messrs. Pappas and Morris suggest: if it fails, we're all screwed, and if an unscrupulous scientist puts an unpleasant package in it, and it's used too quickly, we're all screwed.  (That, recall, was the premise in Rainbow Six: a biotech company engineers both a plague and a vaccine, and the vaccine it distributes to the general population has an unpleasant package in it.)

Once we get the coronavirus behind us, it is long past time for the countries of the Third World to get with the success sequence: free minds, free markets, and transparent institutions.  I'll give the late Edward Lazear the final word.  "Incomes of the poor are higher and grow more rapidly under free-market capitalism than they do in economies with less private ownership, more restrictions on trade, and a greater governmental role in allocation."

So mote it be.