How Pfizer Cashed In on the Pandemic: The drug maker's strategy all along has been to maximize profits for itself.

• Author: Nichols, John

The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. spoke the most fundamental truth of the coronavirus pandemic more than fifty years before the COVID crisis hit. "Of all the forms of inequality," he said at the second convention of the Medical Committee for Human Rights on March 25, 1966, "injustice in health is the most shocking and the most inhuman because it often results in physical death."

When COVID-19 struck, King's words were frequently recalled, as the passing decades had not addressed health inequality. The Reverend William J. Barber II saw the truth immediately, observing in March 2020:

"This moral crisis is coming to a head as the coronavirus pandemic lays bare America's deep injustices. While the virus itself does not discriminate, it is the poor and disenfranchised who will experience the most suffering and death."

As the pandemic grew more severe, physicians and scientists filled in the details. The Centers for Disease Control acknowledged that "longstanding systemic health and social inequities have put many people from racial and ethnic minority groups at increased risk" of getting sick and dying from COVID-19. The Lancet observed that the pandemic "has highlighted the equity gap in outcomes for marginalized communities, specifically the Black community, as starkly shown by the disparate morbidity and mortality from COVID-19 in individuals from these communities compared with the majority white population."

Surely, this was the time to address the racial, social, and economic injustices that had always existed but were now fully exposed. Yet through 2020 and into 2021, injustices persisted--in part because the structures that had been established for responding to health care challenges actually perpetuated inequalities.

There were many explanations for this widening inequality gap, including the Trump Administration's failure to take the basic steps required to develop a smart and fair program for vaccine distribution in the United States, let alone the world. Much was made of the reticence of particular communities to trust vaccination programs administered by a government with an ugly history of medical experimentation on, and medical neglect of, racial and ethnic minorities.

But not much attention was given to another factor: the way the U.S. economy is rigged to benefit multinational corporations at the expense of common sense and common decency. It's not just capitalism that is a problem, although the pandemic certainly revealed a great many flaws in the theory that the free market can resolve societal challenges. It's also the way in which capitalism works in a country like the United States--with its cronyism...