Alexander Zaitchik’s Book on the History of Pharma Featured in The New York Review of Books

The following is a review excerpt of Owning the Sun: A People’s History of Monopoly Medicine from Aspirin to COVID-19 Vaccines by Economy for All fellow Alexander Zaitchik. Click here to read the full article.

Unreasonable Terms

In Owning the Sun, Alexander Zaitchik shows how American drug companies have exploited government contracts to pursue profit over public interest.

By Daniel J. Kevles

One of the main corporate participants in Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration’s multibillion-dollar crash program to create and produce a Covid-19 vaccine, was Moderna. The federal government gave Moderna, which in 2019 was a small, unprofitable pharmaceutical firm, some $2.48 billion for vaccine development and bought millions of doses at $26 each for essentially free distribution to US residents. Moderna’s profits soared to $21 billion over the course of the pandemic. In late 2022, when federal subsidies seemed on the verge of ending, the company announced that it would soon offer an updated version of its vaccine at as much as $130 per dose. Many Americans were outraged.

Moderna’s behavior will not surprise readers of the journalist Alexander Zaitchik’s Owning the Sun, an indictment of American drug companies and the federal government for all too often privileging profits over health, and of the research universities, medical professionals, and philanthropists who have been deeply complicit with them. Ranging for the most part from the early years of the United States to the Covid-19 pandemic, the book shows how the drug industry and its affiliates operated in a state of ethical grace through much of the nineteenth century and in the twentieth fell from it with accelerating speed.

Zaitchik relies heavily upon recent studies that have called the prescription drug industry and its allies to account, for example Paul Farmer’s Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor (2003) and Graham Dutfield’s That High Design of Purest Gold: A Critical History of the Pharmaceutical Industry, 1880–2020 (2020). What distinguishes Owning the Sun is its aim to be a “people’s history” that tells the interrelated stories of drug commerce and the patent system “from the perspective of the dissenters, critics, and antagonists.”

Click here to read the full article.

Billionaires’ Big Plans for Humanity’s Long-Term Future

The following is an excerpt of an article that was originally published on The New Republic.
Click here to read the full article.

Longtermists focus on ensuring humanity’s existence into the far future. But not without sacrifices in the present.

By Alexander Zaitchik

“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future” is a line sometimes attributed to Yogi Berra and sometimes to the Danish physicist Niels Bohr. Whoever said it first, or better, I’ll give it to the Dane. Bohr revealed the randomness and unknowability that defines that tiniest of time horizons, the movement of electrons, and his legacy is an exemplar of the paradox of progress. After helping the Allies win a nuclear arms race against the Nazis, Bohr tried and failed to stop another between Washington and Moscow, only to die of heart failure weeks after the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis, in somber accord with another Berra observation, this one uncontested, that the future ain’t what it used to be.

The tragic ironies and grim specters of Bohr’s generation haunt but don’t much disturb What We Owe the Future, William MacAskill’s contribution to longterm­ism—a small, well-funded, and stealthily influential movement based in his home institution, Oxford University. Longtermism, in its most distilled form, posits that one’s highest ethical duty in the present is to increase the odds, however slightly, of humanity’s long-term survival and the colonization of the Virgo supercluster of galaxies by our distant descendants. Since the distribution of intellectual and material resources is zero-sum, this requires making sacrifices in the present. These sacrifices are justified, argue the longtermists, because technological advance will in time produce such literally astronomical amounts of future “value” that the travails and sufferings of today’s meat-puppet humanity pale to near-insignificance. This overwhelming potential, writes MacAskill, creates an ethical mandate to abandon “the tyranny of the present over the future.”

The number of potential people who fill this theoretical future can’t be counted without recourse to the factored numbers that clutter so much longtermist literature. MacAskill dispenses with these in favor of three pages filled with the unisex bathroom symbol, each representing 10 billion people, to suggest the scope of the moral responsibility they impose upon us. “The future could be very big,” according to Mac­Askill. “It could also be very good—or very bad.” The good version, he argues, requires us to maintain and accelerate economic growth and technological progress, even at great cost, to facilitate the emergence of artificial intelligence that can, in turn, scale growth exponentially to fuel cosmic conquest by hyperintelligent beings who will possess only a remote ancestral relationship to homo sapiens.

With its blend of wild-eyed techno-optimism and utopianism, longtermism has emerged as the parlor philosophy of choice among the Silicon Valley jet-pack set. Mac­Askill’s colleague, the Swedish-born philosopher Nick Bostrom, drew attention in the early 2000s with his work developing the concept of “existential risk”—a philosophical frame that assesses the value and significance of events by how likely they are to secure or threaten humanity’s continued existence. In recent years, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Skype founder Jaan Tallinn have all expressed interest in his ideas. In 2012, Tallinn co-founded the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge University, and he has been a major donor to the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, where Bostrom has worked on a longtermist research agenda.

MacAskill’s work has also found praise in Silicon Valley, with Elon Musk describing What We Owe the Future, in a typically self-regarding endorsement, as “a close match for my philosophy.” Of the many marquee-name blurbs and affirmations showered on the book, this one by the world’s richest person comes closest to suggesting the real significance of longterm­ism’s creeping influence. Because, for all its sci-fi flavorings, what commands attention to longtermism is not any compelling case for prioritizing the value of distant exoplanets and centuries, but the billionaire politics it seeks to impose on the rest of us.

Read more at The New Republic.

Alexander Zaitchik is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and a freelance journalist based in New Orleans. His writing has appeared in the Nation, the New Republic, the Intercept, the Guardian, Rolling Stone, Foreign Policy, Vice and more. He is the author of several books, including Owning the Sun: A People’s History of Monopoly Medicine from Aspirin to COVID-19 (Counterpoint Press, 2022).

A People’s History of Monopoly Medicine from Aspirin to COVID-19 Vaccines—New Book from Economy for All Fellow Alexander Zaitchik

Owning the Sun: A People’s History of Monopoly Medicine from Aspirin to COVID-19 Vaccines will be released by Counterpoint Press this year by IMI Economy for All fellow Alexander Zaitchik.

One of the most problematic areas in the social response to the world health crisis of COVID-19 has been the profit-seeking and opportunism of Western private businesses. Monopolistic control and no-bid contracts have been handed to pharmaceutical companies that for the most part have developed medicines based on public research. Zaitchik’s book offers the key history, context, and framework from which a general sense of a people’s politics of medicine can be projected. IMI will be working this year to distribute and amplify the careful research and reporting from Zaitchik’s book.

If you ever wondered how we went from a culture that produced Jonas Salk, who understood vaccines as a social product and a public good, to pharmaceutical executives at companies like Pfizer and BioNTech coldbloodedly negotiating the sale of their medicines while prioritizing profits over public health, Owning the Sun is the book to get answers to how we got here and how we can do better.

More Information:

Owning the Sun tells the story of one of the most contentious fights in human history: the legal right to control the production of lifesaving medicines. Medical science began as a discipline geared toward the betterment of all human life, but the merging of research with intellectual property and the rise of the pharmaceutical industry warped and eventually undermined its ethical foundations. Since World War II, federally funded research has facilitated most major medical breakthroughs, yet these drugs are often wholly controlled by price-gouging corporations with growing international ambitions. Why does the U.S. government fund the development of medical science in the name of the public, only to relinquish exclusive rights to drug companies, and how does such a system impoverish us, weaken our responses to global crises, and, as in the case of AIDS and COVID-19, put the world at risk?

Outlining how generations of public health and science advocates have attempted to hold the line against Big Pharma and their allies in government, Alexander Zaitchik’s first of its kind history documents the rise of medical monopoly in the United States and its subsequent globalization. From the controversial arrival of patent-wielding German drug firms in the late 19th century, to present-day coordination between industry and philanthropic organizations—including the influential Gates Foundation—that stymie international efforts to vaccinate the world against COVID-19, Owning the Sun tells one of the most important and least understood histories of our time.

Praise for Owning the Sun:

“A brave and timely reminder… A trenchant study of the dangers of turning medical knowledge into private intellectual property.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Journalist Zaitchik (The Gilded Rage) takes readers through the labyrinthine history of medical patents in this expansive study… Zaitchik covers a remarkable amount of ground and never gets lost in the weeds. The result is comprehensive and illuminating.” —Publishers Weekly

“Riveting. Owning the Sun masterfully explains how Big Pharma methodically gained global control over the largely public-funded ‘intellectual property’ required to manufacture new therapies (like the COVID-19 vaccines). A must-read for those wanting to understand how this unfolded.” —John Abramson, MD, author of Sickening: How Big Pharma Broke American Health Care and How We Can Repair It

“Highly informative and deeply troubling reading.” —Library Journal

“With so many Americans unable to afford ever soaring drug prices, Zaitchik’s important [and] insightful history of the rise of Big Pharma demonstrates the urgency of restraining pharmaceutical monopoly power.” —U.S. Representative Lloyd Doggett, House Ways and Means Health Subcommittee Chair