Covid 19 crisis is a health pandemonium refashioning socio-economic, environmental and cultural depths of people in and around Cordillera Administrative Region (CAR), Region 1, as well as other areas in the Philippines.
People from all walks of life are undergoing radical change in work setting, domiciliary and routine activities. Every citizen is severely affected.
Economy in CAR, Region1 and elsewhere in the Philippine will keep on hemorrhaging and regions will likely impose rolling lockdowns until that much-coveted vaccine is discovered.
In Baguio City’s case, where tourism is an important revenue earner, business will not increase even if a ban will be lifted.
If, to abide by guessing, Covid 19 crisis will ease in the coming months.
However, it’s a long shot of hope the pandemic will end until antiviral medicines on trial reach success. And maybe, some years from when this coronavirus started, it will be eradicated.
Until then, such scenario about the pandemic actually playing out as postulated by many remains unlikely in the near future. Why?
Medical scientist around the globe race against time to develop an effective vaccine that the effort has turned into a global completion and seemingly like a global arms race is underway.
Second, what started as the question as to who would eventually capture the scientific accolade, the patents and ultimately the profits from a developed vaccine has suddenly developed into an issue of national security.
Thirdly, the discovery of a vaccine is no sure guarantee that people in all countries will be able to have immediate access to it.
Because behind the very determined nationalistic scramble is a harsh reality: new vaccines potent enough to stop coronavirus will be in short supply. Governments in countries where these vaccines have been developed will make sure their millions of citizens will be the first in line to get their dose of vaccine.
A sad reality but which had happened and will happen again. Covid-19 is more likely to edge out in the same manner that every sweeping disease culminate: vaccines and treatments will be buried in an avalanche of patents, and pharmaceutical corporations will ultimately cause the decisions about who lives and who dies.
Since it is suspected that coronavirus originated from China, countries around the world have rose to a global shake-up and wake-up call that their biotechnology is a strategic industry for their societies and now do not want to be beholden to a foreign power for access to drugs needed in a crisis.
This has become a battle of supremacy over products that may determine who lives and who dies.
There’s an oft-said Filipino statement, “Itaga mo sa bato,” for the truth of the matter is: big pharmaceutical corporations race to find coronavirus treatment but it will be expensive for the poor countries.
With every nation on the globe in want of a life-saving vaccine, countries with the deepest pockets will secure these vaccines first, leaving developing and poor countries trailing behind.
There will be rationing by price and it will be brutal.
How so?
Medical patents are the equivalent of legalized monopolies or private companies that offer services or products at regulated price. Theoretically, patents are supposed to grant pharmaceutical corporations compensation, award or grant for their R&D or research and development for something new, the term and award extending for many years.
But in reality, or in practice, just tweaking a minor change in the supposed new product under R&D can extend the term and the grant considerably, and as a result, can foreclose market competition while granting pharmaceutical companies the disposition to dictate prices.
Hence, if a country is economically poor, the ability to purchase vaccines for its millions of populace will severely be hampered, as compared by developed nations with deep money reserve.
It does not mean that the Philippines, a developing country, doesn’t have the capacity to purchase vaccine. On the contrary, it has a reserve for such contingency.
However, price dictated by such companies for a new medication developed can be so steep it undercuts volume of what any developing country need to purchase, thereby affecting total number of population projected to be served by the purchase.
In today’s pandemic, countries will have to compete with each other for the vaccine.
And because pandemics tend to hit countries with the most fragile and underfunded healthcare systems, there results an imbalance between need and purchasing power when it comes to vaccines.
Here’s a stark example of the above. Back in 1996, a treatment for HIV/AIDS was brought out by a group of pharmaceutical corporations, for marketing in the United States. The treatment was a combination of antiretroviral medicines.
Problem was, when it was marketed, it was priced annually at 5,500-pound sterling per person, or the equivalent of 405,734 Philippine peso currency.
In most parts of the world where nations are poor, such steep price by pharmaceutical companies was just as equivalent to giving a death sentence or, for a person having no treatment at all because of lack of money.
It took until 2004, after millions of people died (32 million died of HIV, UN data) that poor countries were able to afford purchase of the treatment.
It will not be surprising that there will be every possibility a Covid-19 vaccine will be encumbered with multiple patents as many pharmaceutical companies, worldwide, are rushing trials and having patents attached to them.
Vaccines are now a big business and pharmaceutical companies, much as we can’t accept it, are motivated first by profit.
A study, entitled, “Big Pharma and Big profits, The Multi-Billion Dollar Vaccine Market,” by Global Research, Centre for Research on Globalization, finds “the business of vaccine is a major source of profits for the world’s largest pharmaceutical corporations.”
Not surprising either, that many countries – like the Philippines – are taking pre-emptive measures to deal with monopoly control over medical treatments. On such measure gaining popularity today is the so-called compulsory licensing – that this pandemic justifies use of compulsory licensing.
Such measure is useful – but it requires a country must go it alone.
Parallel with such a stance, President Rodrigo Duterte, well aware of compulsory licensing, announced that he will give an amount of 10 million pesos’ bounty to any Filipino successful in discovering a treatment for Covid-19.
On another front and equally important, Duterte pledged undisclosed and substantial amount of grant to the laboratories of the University of the Philippines (UP) and the Philippine General Hospital (PGH) in their efforts towards producing a cure for the disease.
But health experts in CAR, Region 1 and the rest of the country cautioned the public-at-large should not assume that a vaccine would be developed “soon,” hence our adapting to the ongoing threat.
Health experts explain some viruses, like Covid-19, are very, very difficult when it comes to vaccine development, that for the foreseeable future, we are going to re-develop ways to go about our lives with this virus as a constant threat. That is going to be the “new normal” for all of us.
Clinical trials have already begun. Clinical trials, essential to regulatory approval, are dictated by three elements: first, involves few volunteers; it maybe a dozen or more to test for safety and detect adverse effects.
Second, will involve hundreds of persons to determine how vaccine is effective and the third will involve thousands of persons.
Usually, the protocol will take 18 to 24 months or a year to conduct tests, to determine effectiveness of a vaccine. That given, no government, worldwide, will be able to eradicate the disease this year.
At present, over 80 pharmaceutical companies and academic institutions around the world are racing against each other to produce a vaccine, five or more of the corporations testing their vaccines on people.
A vaccine will save lives, especially if the virus becomes endemic or perennially circulating. But until then, our best hope is to slow down the spread of the disease as slow as possible.
Last April 23, Philippine General Hospital (PGH), in an experimental treatment, announced that of the 5 patients who received blood plasma from people who recovered from coronavirus, four showed improvements. The fifth died due to pre-existing ailments.
PGH has shown convalescent plasma as a potential therapy for Covid-19. It can be recalled that blood plasma treatment had been used previously in treatment of diseases, like Ebola –Bony A. Bengwayan
