As millions of people around the world and in the United States suffer for decades from the privatization of Health and Pharmaceuticals, ITUC, the USA’s puppet-trade union organization, is running to applaud Biden’s announcements about the alleged abolition of vaccine patents against COVID presenting the war of monopolies as a positive development for the peoples.
Because the ITUC is a US-controlled mechanism, it makes such a statement, which conceals that also with the Biden government, the US are leaders in stockpiling millions of vaccines, far more than its population, under the Defense Production Act. They prohibit any export of vaccines or vaccine components and deprive other peoples of vaccination.
At the same time as the United States is counting nearly 600,000 dead, the Biden administration has continued itsfunding with tens of billions of dollars in aid policies to the pharmaceutical industry, without giving a single dollar to strengthen the Public Health System, which Democrats and Republicans have dismantled all these years.
At the same time that the United States are talking about “abolition of patents” they are holding about 60 million doses of Astra Zeneca vaccine that have already been produced or are in the process of being produced, negotiating economic and geopolitical exchanges. In fact, the Biden government is negotiating over dead people to export to India part of the 10 million doses of vaccine it has kept in stock, while thousands die every day!
In addition, while the US are talking about abolishing patents, the US itself is accused of blocking the distribution of ingredients needed to make non-US Coronavirus vaccines, preventing the manufacture and distribution of the vaccines themselves.
Finally, as the United States speaks of “international cooperation” in the face of the pandemic, it continues its deadly embargo and attacks on the Cuban people and Cuban health workers who have been at the forefront of the pandemic and the struggle for vaccine production.
The ITUC, because it is a US puppet organization, conceals all of the above and once again acts as an advertiser for the US killing machine. A killing machine, which on the one hand kills people all over the world with wars, interventions and embargoes, while on the other it kills its own people with a fully privatized Health System and drug patents in their land.
Trade unions representing workers, on principle do not accept Health and Medicine as a commodity, or a “weapon” in the trade wars and rivalries of the imperialist centers, which compete,even to share the vaccine market. Trade unions representing workers are fighting and claiming the right of peoples to free public health.
In particular, the Coronavirus pandemic has highlighted the dangerous and murderous role of the multinationals of Health and Pharmaceuticals. With each passing day, the deadly nature of patents and commercial exploitation on vaccines and drugsby a handful of monopolies is increasingly revealed. Vaccines and drugs, which are achievements of science and human labor.
