Headline Diplomat eJournal – Issue 1, Series 2
The perilous lenses of COVID-19: The sociopolitical impact
Writes Edwin Oedipo, Content Writer, Headline Diplomat eJournal, LUDCI.eu
COVID-19 has brought an unprecedented health crisis around the world. People have lost their jobs and many economic spheres have been affected deeply. However, amidst this global epidemic, one industry is not only still standing, but gaining!
The Pharmaceutical field has experienced steady growth even as other businesses are making huge losses and some are closing. According to Technavio’s custom research reports, it is forecasted that the pharmaceutical logistics market will grow due to a rise in pharmaceutical sales. Companies like Eli Lily and Gilead, are observing a positive growth in the stock market.
Many countries around the globe have adjusted their resources and pumped them into their health sectors. Of course, they need pharmaceutical products to treat COVID-19. They must buy medicine, conduct tests and search for a vaccine.
Pfizer is one of the biggest gainers from the coronavirus outbreak. Pfizer’s pneumonia vaccine Prevnar 13 has seen an unforeseen rise in sales, presumptively because of the COVID-19, which in serious cases causes pneumonia with high mortality rates.
So far, no drug has been approved as the universal treatment for COVID-19 patients. Different countries around the world are using different drugs. Some of the drugs in use include hydroxychloroquine, remdesivir, tocilizumab, lopinavir, ACE inhibitors, etc.
Without a clear medicine for SARS-COV-2, people are being used as experiments and many have succumbed to death. Most of the drugs being used are still under laboratory studies gauging for their effectiveness. For instance, the Remdesivir drug is being used to treat COVID-19 symptoms in the US, EU, and Japan. Actually, it was approved by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), yet it’s under laboratory studies for its potency.
This indicates how pharmaceutical companies are being enriched at the expense of the people who fund them. Companies like Gilead, the creators of Remdesivir have had the most controversies of all drug companies fighting COVID-19. Remdesivir has been given the Compassionate Use Program (CUP) status and it is one of the top drugs battling COVID-19.
“Pharmaceutical companies view COVID-19 as a once-in-a-lifetime business opportunity,” said Gerald Posner, author of “Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America.” Yes, many pharmaceutical companies are working vigorously to come up with a vaccine and drugs that will rack up billions. As people around the world continue to suffer, pharmaceutical companies are getting richer.
Even as large pharmaceutical companies rush to find a COVID-19 vaccine and cure, the origin of the deadly virus is still a mystery. This raises more questions than answers as to whether the virus was manmade or different.
At first, there were question marks on whether face masks worked. Then, it was followed by questions marks about the accuracy of the tests. The most surprising incidence was when people who did not have any travel history or contact with COVID-19 patients tested positive.
From mid-February, there was a lot of hype and misleading information about Coronavirus. Some media houses went on to report true and untrue information about the virus as it ravaged one continent to another. This caused mayhem in many countries. Understanding the risk, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, warned, “Our enemy is also growing surge misinformation”. He added, “The antidote to this pandemic of misinformation is fact-based news and analysis. It depends on media freedom and independent reporting”.
In places like America, coronavirus wiped out many black people by the end of April. In one of the interviews with the New York Times, Lori Lightfoot, the mayor of Chicago, said, “Those numbers take your breath away, they really do”. She was referring to the announced statistics of the outbreak in her city. African-Americans accounted for more than half of those who tested positive and 72 percent virus-related deaths in Chicago. This was on April 7.
Another scenario is the indigenous people of Brazil. The indigenous communities in the Amazon region and Brazil are in danger of being wiped out. In an interview with BBC News, Dr. Sofia Mendonca, a researcher at the Federal University of Sao Paulo, said, “There is an incredible risk of the virus spreading across the native communities and wiping them out”.
Newsguard noticed 191 websites in North America and Europe that have published wrong information about Coronavirus. Another study carried out by Reuters Institute discovered that 1/3 of social media users reported seeing false or misleading data about the virus.
When President Trump endorsed chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine as potential “game-changers” during one of his press conferences in March, it spurred many individuals and countries to stockpile the drugs. Countries like Algeria and Indonesia stockpiled the drug. Philippe Besset, who heads the main representative body of French pharmacists, the FSPF, said, “pharmacies had witnessed a surge in demand for hydroxychloroquine, marketed by pharmaceutical giant Sanofi under the trade name Plaquenil”. He also told France 24, “We’ve also witnessed a spike in the number of prescriptions for the drug”.
With all the unanswered questions about COVID-19, new drugs are still being experimented on different COVID-19 patients. Vaccine trials are also being rolled out and tests being done on a larger scale than it was 5 months ago.
Conclusion:
As lockdown restrictions are being eased and some economies slowly opening up, many people are hoping for a lasting solution. But the question still lingers – is COVID-19 a manmade virus to reduce certain populations or is it aimed at enriching pharmaceutical companies? As long as the origin of COVID-19 is still unknown, there will always be questions to answer.
