Thursday, April 09, 2020
Anarchism and Pandemics
I highly recommend William Gillis's "Anarchism and Pandemics" at the Center for a Stateless Society site. It's one of the best things I've read so far on how a free society could deal with a serious pandemic.
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Since the COVID-19 outbreak, libertarians often argue that only price-gouging laws cause shortages. But there are many more reasons of these shortages. Intellectual property laws and bailouts cause shortages.
Intellectual property laws caused ventilator shortages. A multi-billion dollar company, Covidien, bought the intellectual property of a smaller company who makes ventilators.
"A multibillion-dollar maker of medical devices bought the small California company that had been hired to design the new machines. The project ultimately produced zero ventilators.
"That failure delayed the development of an affordable ventilator by at least half a decade, depriving hospitals, states and the federal government of the ability to stock up. The federal government started over with another company in 2014, whose ventilator was approved only last year and whose products have not yet been delivered.
"Government officials and executives at rival ventilator companies said they suspected that Covidien had acquired Newport to prevent it from building a cheaper product that would undermine Covidien’s profits from its existing ventilator business."
Intellectual property also caused a drug shortage. Governments around the world are beginning to suspend drug patents:
"German Chancellor Angela Merkel described the coronavirus as the greatest challenge facing her country since the end of World War II. Germany’s parliament took that message to heart as part of a package to fight the virus, extending powers to suspend patent rights, a tool last used in the country in 1949.
"Governments around the world are reviving rarely used legislation or pledging new measures to ensure that they have the drugs they need to battle the pandemic. Israel last month invoked an emergency patent-suspension clause in its 1967 code for the first time, allowing it to import a generic version of AbbVie Inc.’s Kaletra, which has shown signs of combating coronavirus.
"In the U.K., so-called Crown Use rules allow the government to suspend protections it would normally grant a patent holder. Those have been used just a handful of times since 1945, but that could change."
Remdesivir is a drug that could potentially treat COVID-19. Gilead, the manufacturer of Remdesivir, sought orphan drug status to prevent competitors from manufacturing generic versions of the drug.
"The orphan designation would have allowed Gilead to block lower-cost generic version of a vital drug for years, assuming the FDA ultimately approves the medicine, known as remdesivir, for treating the novel coronavirus. Several clinical trials are under way to test the medicine and some results are due shortly, although hopes are already high remdesivir will prove effective. Orphan status also provides tax credits.
"For this reason, the Trump administration, whose coronavirus task force includes former Gilead executive Joseph Grogan, was criticized for considering Covid-19 to be a rare disease. The company was also pilloried for seeking the designation. And in its statement, Gilead acknowledged seeking orphan status in early March, suggesting the company was well aware that Covid-19 would not be contained."
Respirators are also in a shortage caused by intellectual property law. The respirator designs are patented, the filters in the respirators are patented, and the machines that manufacture the respirators are patented.
Government bailouts also caused shortages in medical equipment manufacturing.
The government is bailing out the restaurant industry, the entertainment industry, the gambling industry, etc. An unintended consequence is that less resources are available for manufacturing medical supplies. When you channel resources and workers to prop up the restaurant industry, less resources and workers would be available to the medical equipment industry. If you keep employees from being fired from the restaurant industry, these employees would less likely to switch jobs to manufacture medical equipment. If you bail out the automatically manufacturing industry, raw materials would be continue to be used into manufacturing automobiles instead of medical equipment like ventilators that is really needed. So the automobile industry and restaurant industries SHOULD fail so the law materials and labor used into making automobiles could shift into making medical equipment. Therefore, businesses SHOULD fail even during an pandemic, so materials and workers would be quickly allocated what is really needed for the pandemic.
Republicans who support the bailouts are no different than the Democrats. They are central planners and think that government intervention is in some situations like pandemics needed to prevent "market failure". They both support corporate bailouts. They both do not understand economics. The only difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Republicans believe that the rich deserves to be rich because they are smart and hardworking and the poor deserve to be poor because they are lazy. This is why Republicans support welfare for the rich but not the poor.
The U.S. government has also worsened the pandemic. Countries like Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore has the outbreak under control. The reason is that these people are wearing face masks. In many parts of Asia, governments encourage or require people to wear face masks to keep the virus from spreading. Masks prevent germs from being spread from sick individuals to healthy individuals. But we do not know who is sick because many of those who are infected with the virus do not display any symptoms. Those asymptomatic individuals are also spreads of the virus. If everyone wore a mask, there would be little risk of those asymptomatic individuals spreading the virus.
But the U.S. government initially discouraged the use of masks because they have a shortage of them. The virus spread to this extent due to lack of mask wearing.
Not only sneezing and coughing, talking also spreads the virus. Here is video footage of droplets being expelled into the air from talking.
Imagine a fast food worker makes a sandwich, and if he talks while making it, droplets will land on the sandwich. The person eating the sandwich might get infected.
Masks not only prevent you from spreading the virus to others through talking, they also prevent you from touching your mouth and nose, preventing both the wearing and other people from getting infected.
Masks also, to a limited degree, protect the wearer because masks helps to reduce the "viral load." If you get a small viral load, you are more likely to survive than if you get a large viral load. The amount of exposure you get counts. This is why many young doctors and nurses are dying. They are exposed to a lot of the virus, they have a high "viral load".
"Virus experts know that viral dose affects illness severity. In the lab, mice receiving a low dose of virus clear it and recover, while the same virus at a higher dose kills them. Dose sensitivity has been observed for every common acute viral infection that has been studied in lab animals, including coronaviruses."
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