A Sociotheological Approach to Catholic Social Teaching: The Role of Religion in Moral Responsibility During COVID-19

This book introduces Catholic social teaching (CST) and its teaching on the common good to the reader and applies them in the realm of public health to critically analyze the major global issues of COVID-19 that undermine public interest. It uses the sociotheological approach that combines the moral principles of CST and the holistic analysis of modern sociology and also utilizes the secondary literature as the main source of textual data. Specifically, it investigates the corporate moral irresponsibility and some unethical business practices of Big Pharma in the sale and distribution of its anti-COVID vaccines and medicines, the injustice in the inequitable global vaccine distribution, the weakening of the United States Congress's legislative regulation against the pharmaceutical industry's overpricing and profiteering, the inadequacy of the World Health Organization's (WHO) law enforcement system against corruption, and the lack of social monitoring in the current public health surveillance system to safeguard the public good from corporate fraud and white-collar crime. This book highlights the contribution of sociology in providing the empirical foundation of CST's moral analysis and in crafting appropriate Catholic social action during the pandemic. It is hoped that through this book, secular scholars, social scientists, religious leaders, moral theologians, religious educators, and Catholic lay leaders would be more appreciative of the sociotheological approach to understanding religion and COVID-19. "This book brings into dialogue two bodies of literature: documents of Catholic social teaching, and modern sociology and its core thinkers and texts…The author does especially well to describe how taking ‘the sociotheological turn'…will benefit the credibility and dissemination of Catholic social thought.” - Rev. Fr. Thomas Massaro, S.J., Professor of Moral Theology, Jesuit School of Theology, Santa Clara University, Berkeley, California. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022.

The WTO and the Covid‐19 "Vaccine Apartheid”: Big Pharma and the Minefield of Patents

Unequal access to vaccines for the Covid‐19 pandemic, also referred to as "vaccine apartheid,” has marginalized low‐income countries again. In October 2020, India and South Africa proposed a temporary waiver from certain provisions of the TRIPS Agreement for the prevention of Covid‐19 at the World Trade Organization (WTO). An agreement was later reached in Geneva on June 17, 2022. The objective of this article is to analyze the negotiation and agreement reached at the WTO. This article explores the difficulties of creating international public good in the field of public health within the milieu of powerful actors, namely big pharmaceutical companies with vested interests. The central argument of this article is that this agreement alone will not solve the vaccine access problem for low‐income countries. It is too restrictive, does not cover trade secrets and know‐how, production capacity, availability of raw materials, and even adds new limitations that did not exist before. The best option to promote the production of quality vaccines in low‐income countries is to share technology and know‐how on a voluntary basis through production agreements. One way to facilitate the cooperation of large pharmaceutical corporation is to make it easier for low‐income countries to use compulsory licenses. Simplifying the use of this mechanism could help encourage pharmaceutical companies to enter into voluntary licensing agreements. © 2023 by the author(s);licensee Cogitatio Press (Lisbon, Portugal).

A mathematical analysis of the socio-economic impacts of a patent waiver on COVID-19 vaccines

We perform a calibrated mathematical analysis of the potential impacts of a patent waiver on COVID-19 vaccines. In the model, we schematically divide nations into high- and low-income, the latter accounting for 80% of the world population but currently using only 60% of the vaccine production. We show that a significant increase in vaccine production combined with a more equitable distribution - made possible by an intellectual property (IP) waiver - would have stopped the pandemic in 18 months of vaccination and saved more than ten million people, mostly in poor countries, compared with five years of the current scenario in which the virus becomes endemic. We hypothesize the peak rollout capacity shown by high-income countries at the beginning of the vaccination campaign and half of that capacity for low-income ones. We even show that the money saved on vaccines globally in the hypothetical IP-waiver scenario overcomes the actual value of the 5-yr profits of the big pharma in the current situation. This profit loss could be immediately covered (mostly by the expected saving of high-income countries) in exchange for the waiver. © 2022 IEEE.

Geopolitics and Financial Profitability, the Big Pharmaceutical Corporations

The pandemic evidenced the struggle for financial profitability of Big Pharmaceutical Corporations, inequality between countries, and within nations, resulting from more than fifty years of stabilization policies, where monetary and fiscal policies have subsumed themselves to the institutional investors’ interests. In the face of lockdown measures and the attempt to return to “normality,” central banks, as lenders of last resort, abandoned financial restriction policies to give way to fiscal policies and promoted a soft readjustment through credit expansion and accelerated public debt looking to recover economic growth in a “fast track.” Proof of this is the worldwide recovery of GDP growth rates but, despite having a rapid recovery, they showed an uncertain scenario in the short and medium terms, accompanied by financial exuberance in stock market indicators at the international level. The focus of this paper will be on demonstrating the profits of pharmaceutical companies, a business that, in the long term, intensified due to the new mutations that SARS-CoV-2 has had during the current situation. It is also important the unequal vaccine access by country and by region. Concluding with a reflection on the struggle between an economy for life and financialized economy. © 2022, Journal of Economic Issues / Association for Evolutionary Economics.

Public power and its right in the regulation of pharmaceutical products: history of a retreat towards regulation without rights

The history of drugs price regulation at the national and supranational level is also the history of a retreat of public law in favor of shifting the relationship between Big Pharma and States on a contractual level. The renunciation of public law transforms fundamental rights, such as the right to health, into commodities to be purchased on the market, subjecting public choices to the rules of profit. What emerges is the worrying result of a globalized regulation in which the States, with no more instruments of public policy, are mere intermediaries between increasingly strong companies and increasingly weaker consumers. What happened with the Covid-19 vaccines is a confirmation of this. © 2021 Societa Editrice il Mulino. All rights reserved.

COVID-19 vaccines, public health goods and Catholic social teaching: Why justice must prevail over charity in the global vaccine distribution

Applying the Roman Catholic Church’s set of moral principles on social concerns called Catholic social teaching (CST) on charity, distributive justice, private property and the common good, and utilising some secondary data and scientific literature, this article argues that establishing distributive justice for the global distribution of the COVID-19 vaccines must be a priority than donating millions of doses in the name of charity to address vaccine scarcity. Catholic social teaching teaches that the right to private property is a basic right but has moral limits and is subordinated to the moral principles on the universal destination of earth’s goods and the common good. Contribution: The current COVID-19 vaccines are developed by people and organisations outside the pharmaceutical companies and largely funded using taxpayers’ money. Thus, by virtue of justice, these vaccines must belong to all nations as global public health goods. Patents are to be suspended to allow poor countries to reproduce the popular vaccines and address the current vaccine shortage.