Regulatory Capture in the Age of Covid
By Liam Cosgrove November 5, 2021
Our healthcare system is broken, a fact nobody would have disputed in pre-COVID times. Regulatory capture is a reality, and the pharmaceutical industry is fraught with examples. Yet we trusted private-public partnerships to find an optimal solution to a global pandemic, assuming a crisis would bring out the best in historically corrupt institutions.
Here in the US, our public health ailments are a bit more complex. These systems are mired in good old-fashioned crony capitalism, fascism, corporatism, mercantilism, protectionism…. fancy words for when private companies work with governments to subvert the forces of competition. The suppression of research into off-patent drugs is a notable symptom of this problem.
The timeline is important to keep in mind in order to grasp the consequences brought on by this failure of our institutions. The pandemic was officially announced in March 2020. We have endured a year of lockdowns, over a third of small businesses closing for good, trillions of dollars diverted, an additional 14 million people facing famine due to lockdowns (some estimates much higher), diminished education from remote learning, mental health issues, rise in crime, the list goes on…
All of this, when we may have had effective treatments as early as April 2020, which our government not only failed to investigate but actively suppressed? Our healthcare system isn’t just broken – it is actively working against public health interests.
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