Episode 129 - Vaccine Apartheid: US Media's Uncritical Adoption of Racist "Intellectual Property" Dogma

<p>“The COVID-19 vaccine is ripe for the blackmarket,” warns an NBC News opinion piece. “Iran-linked hackers recently targeted coronavirus drugmaker Gilead,” reports Reuters. “Hackers ‘try to steal COVID vaccine secrets in intellectual property war,’” blares a Guardian headline. As the COVID-19 pandemic raged and pharmaceutical companies raced to develop a vaccine, Western media routinely asserted without question or criticism the premise that vaccine “intellectual property” is a zero-sum possession that’s been “stolen” by malicious foreign actors, blackmarket criminals, and of course, dreaded “pirates.”</p> <p>With rare exception, the conceit that intellectual property for the COVID-19 vaccine is a finite thing that can be leaked, spied on or stolen — presumably to the detriment of the average American, somehow — is simply taken for granted. Similarly, assumed across corporate media reports is the notion that it is the US government’s job — no, their duty — is to protect sacred American intellectual property. National security experts, weapons contractor-funded think tanks, and national security reporters uniformly decry the sinister and shadowy agents and adversaries out to snatch America’s hard-earned vaccine dominance.<br /> Nowhere in all this fear mongering and hand-wringing is there any sense of the much greater injustice at work: that the vaccine is in fact hoarded by the security states of wealthy nations, secured for power and securitized for profit. It is virtually unquestioned that only some countries or companies should be allowed access to the knowledge of finding and developing a vaccine, and no consideration that, maybe, there’s no such thing as too many countries working toward the management and eradication of a deadly virus.</p> <p>From this default capitalist — and as we will show, racist — mindset has emerged what activists have long argued would be inevitable: a global apartheid regime of vaccine access that tracks almost one-to-one with historical currents of colonialism. An extension of an