The Deadly Logics of Biocapital
The COVID-19 pandemic reignited discussions about patent regimes and distribution sovereignty to address vaccine apartheid. Economists like Jayati Ghosh and Joseph Stiglitz emphasized national sovereignty over vaccine production and distribution as a necessary corrective to “vaccine imperialism.” This presentation, focusing on the production and circulation of AstraZeneca vaccines, argues for two Marxist interventions on health.
First, it highlights the inadequacies of binaries like North and South in understanding vaccine distribution, which unfold over a complex terrain of patents, multilateral purchase agreements, and financial bonds. The history of Indian pharma illustrates the complex entanglements and brokerage economies involving venture capitalists, universities, pharmaceutical companies, nation-states, NGOs, and international institutions. In the decolonial era, the state's capacity to secure health for its republic centered on manufacturing and distribution capabilities. Preventive health and the production of generic medicines and vaccines became integral to national sovereignty. However, since the 1980s, liberalized fiscal policies and land distribution facilitated the growing privatization of vaccine manufacturing in India. By the 1990s, India had become a hub for generic medicines, vaccines, and clinical trials. The rhetoric of South-South cooperation and anticolonial non-alignment masks the corporate interests driving India's pharma capital expansion. Health sovereignty overlooks the circuit of capital and the deeper interconnections between health, capital, and the state.
Second, by tracing the relations between universities, finance capital, manufacturers, GAVI/WHO, and the State, the presentation reveals how global supply chains generate value. Health crises are both constitutive of and consequential for capital circuits. The pandemic crisis structure reveals the workings of global capitalism in the health sector, transcending geographic boundaries. The violent exclusion of people through death and lifelong disability (health crisis) is not a consequence but a condition of possibility for capital.