Thread by @bookcheekite

(Thread)
Exploiting Covid-19 for Power 5 part analysis
1 The Science
2 Dominant Pharmaceutical Capital
3 The Rest of the Dominant Capital Market
4 The State of Capital
5 The Role of Misinformation and Disinformation in Expanding the Pandemic Problem
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capitalaspower.com/casp-forum/top…

1. The Science
The Vaccine
So while it is important to try and separate the science of Covid-19 Vaccines from the business of Covid-19 Vaccines, this is no simple task, since the science is bought and paid for by both Public and Private Sector money.
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mRNA vaccines spent 5 decades in development hell. lots of fights over patenting issues, companies set up to try and profit from research, companies failing, being bought, a kind of musical chairs of company founders/scientists jumping to larger firms.
(3)nature.com/articles/d4158…

around 2010, 2 important things happened
1) UPenn sold exclusive patent rights for mRNA process that resulted in Pseudourodrine (which prevented the host body from seeing the foreign mRNA as an antagonist), for $300,000 to a small Lab-Reagent company now called CellScript
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who have since made millions in sublicensing this patent to companies like Moderna,
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2) from the early 1980’s until 2012 Canadian Pieter Cullis and his team of researchers at University of British Colombia, developed Lipid Nano Particle tech, which forms the basis of the delivery platform for mRNA vaccines.
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By 2012, they had managed to develop the technology enough that mass production was possible. And this is when big money investors became interested.
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This meant the day after the SARS-COV-2 Virus Genome was made publicly available, companies like Moderna and BionTech were ready with their vaccines to begin testing. Whoever made it to market first with a proven Vaccine, was going to make Billions in international sales
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Preparation and forewarning
Almost every science writer and journalist, at some point, had written a piece like “It’s not if, but when” with regards to a pandemic being an existential threat to humanity.
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emro.who.int/pandemic-epide…

I had read so many of these by 2018, that I included it in a podcast episode I did with a friend about existential risks. And yet, studies have found that not a single country, rich or poor, was prepared when the pandemic hit.
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The first 6 months of the pandemic saw 100,000 research papers published about Covid-19. (although analyses of the first 10,000 showed that only about 40% were original research, and the other 60% were mostly opinion pieces) It was an unprecedented achievement for science.
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But the result was a rollout of mismatched and counterproductive government and business policies that got so bad, that eventually, the only solution was lockdowns.
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books.google.com.bh/books?hl=en&lr…

This is the surface reading of lockdowns, but a long-view of the lockdowns shows they led to stimulus spending, predominantly benefitting a small portion of the private sector, very disproportionately (1% of businesses reaped 25% of the $700bn reward)
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nytimes.com/2020/12/02/bus…

and the stimulus spending that went to households, triggered a spending frenzy that massively boosted the Consumer Discretionary sector, and the IT and Communications Sectors.
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So while it would be unwise to say the lockdowns were a deliberate decision to assist Capitalist, it is not far fetched to say that poor governance, and poor planning, allowed the optimal conditions for Capitalists to pounce on a crisis, as they have often done in the past.
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2. Dominant Pharmaceutical Capital
Looking at the Pharmaceutical Industry through the #CasP framework, we can see a number of very telling indicators showing how its Dominant players Accumulated Differentially.
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1st, Mergers and Acquisitions increased 17% in the first half of 2020, which is a massive increase in breadth given the downturn taken by much of the rest of the economy.
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pharmanewsintel.com/news/pharmaceu…

2nd, Strategic Sabotage in the form of Patenting saw a 6.3% rise in BioTech and a 10.2% rise in Pharmaceuticals. So not only were they consolidating like crazy, they were also enclosing the access rights to a life-saving technology.
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sciencebusiness.net/covid-19/news-…

3rd, Depth of Capital Accumulation also increased during this time, as desperation by those with less power allowed the Pharma giants to vary their prices by region, and gouge the international market for as much profit as they could get away with
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npr.org/sections/goats…

4th, The Direction and Pace of Industry was decidedly skewed toward broadening and deepening power. Vaccine Production facilities were largely outside of the regions where they were most needed, and this did not change, and has not changed
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bmj.com/content/375/bm…

because to do so would reduce the power now held by the producer to get away with the 3rd point made above. From 2022, plans are being made to begin production in India and South Africa of mRNA vaccines, but this process has taken 2 years to come to fruition,
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and developing the production facilities up to par is going to take an additional several months. These delays, again served to strengthen the power-base of Dominant Capital.
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5th, Weeding out Competition was very subversive throughout the pandemic, very specifically in the form of Media bias being propagated against the Chinese Sinopharm vaccine.
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By painting China as the cause of the pandemic, and the source of the virus, western media was able to influence the majority of nations into rejecting the Sinopharm Vaccine in favour of Western Vaccines.
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With the result being that of all the big vaccine producers, Sinopharm was the only one that failed to accumulate capital at a net positive rate throughout the pandemic.

3. The Rest of the Dominant Capital Market
2020 was a banger year for Dominant Capital. the Financial Times did a list of “the top 100 winners of the pandemic“, and USA Today showed that Billionaires added almost a trillion dollars to their combined income in 2020.
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Below, you can see the infographic of the big winners, dominated by Big Tech, Communications, Healthcare, and Consumer Discretionary.
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It is important to note here that the same tactics employed by Pharma’s Dominant Capital, was also employed by the rest of the Dominant Capital playing field.
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Mergers and acquisitions were down globally, but kicked back up in North America in the 3rd and 4th quarters of 2020,
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imaa-institute.org/mergers-and-ac…

and as lockdowns were ended and economies reopened, a global supply chain crisis gave dominant capital all the excuse they needed to begin inflating their prices as they swung into a depth phase.
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The Industry that is most deeply hit by lockdowns, is Oil and Gas. 2020 was a terrible year for them, while 2021 was a much better year.
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So they will likely be the ones least eager to see any kind of lockdown be re-enacted. I don’t know how to check for lobbying activity in this regard, but it would be invaluable to know where the oil industry is spending their lobbying dollars right now.
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4. The State of Capital
As illustrated above, the state’s lockdown procedures were not running counter to Dominant Capital in all cases, and in many cases acted as a support structure for Dominant Capital’s accumulation practices.
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In addition the state also enabled Dominant Capital accumulation by means of trade influence to ensure wealthy countries benefited more from changes in trade flows than did poorer countries.
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journals.plos.org/plosone/articl…

In addition to support for differential accumulation, wealthy nations created, in conjunction with Dominant Capital, a despicably large gap in vaccine equity.
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While rich and middle income nations are now at an average of 70% vaccinated, poor nations are still struggling at around 7%. and it is not just internationally that this wealth/vaccine inequity was perpetuated.
(36)
vox.com/22759707/covid…

Poor and marginalized communities in wealthy nations have also been disproportionately undervaccinated.
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books.google.com.bh/books?hl=en&lr…

The vast response to much of the criticism surrounding this point has been that poor and marginalized communities have shown a large Hesitancy to take the vaccines.
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But putting aside the fact that many of these communities have ample reason to distrust Pharmaceutical companies and Governments that have a long history of using and abusing them by dumping faulty or expired medications on them and using them as involuntary experiments,
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there is the question of the deliberate spread of counterfactual information that has resulted in the majority of the hesitancy. Which brings us to point number 5.
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5. The Role of Misinformation and Disinformation
Many believe that the anti-vaccine community is decentralized and largely spearheaded by concerned soccer moms terrified their children will develop Autism from the chemical cocktails the state wants to force onto them.
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To some extent, there is some truth to this belief, because a large and vocal portion of the the anti-vaccine community is exactly this type of demographic.
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But what is largely ignored is that these entities tend to act as boosters for the disinformation rather than as the original source.
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Research done by the Center for Countering Digital Hate has found that the vast majority (over 70%) of all Vaccine and Covid-19 Disinformation, originates from just 12 influential social media accounts. Now dubbed the Disinformation Dozen,
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wbur.org/onpoint/2021/0…

and that within this group, the most prevalent voice is that of Joseph Mercola, an osteopath with an “alternative health” Empire he runs jointly with his wife, to the value of over $100million.
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nytimes.com/2021/07/24/tec…

So what we see is almost a perfect storm of conditions for the Power of Capital. Science enclosed by property rights, generating Differential Accumulation in the health industry,
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and the State of Capital ensuring further differential Accumulation by sectors outside of health, while simultaneous reinforcing global divides, deepening and broadening power bases, while the little emperors of pseudoscience re-enforce foundations for the global divides.
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