Capitalism solves disease- it is the cure for our society

Based on these interpretations, the advocates argue that the COVID-19 pandemic reveals that a revolutionary socialist program is the only solution to the global capitalism’s failures on the pandemic. Further, they assert that the pandemic gives the impetus to the ongoing deeply rooted class struggle between the ruling class and the working class while it necessitates a fundamental social change toward a Marxist government (IMT 2020; SEPA 2020).

Henceforth, based on a rather brief review of this movement, the present author would like to outline several critiques on their proposals. The first is that they look over the fact that the most advanced capitalist economy has succeeded in producing highly effective pandemic virus vaccines in record time, in only nine months, because of the entrepreneurial successes of the leading pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, Novavax, and AstraZeneca which are one of the hallmarks of capitalism (USFDA 2020a, b).

In the Marxist economy in which the supplies of medicines and medical services are controlled by the government and the communist party, such successful pharmaceutical companies with cutting-edge technologies would not be possible to build, making it far more difficult to develop rapidly such highly effective vaccines during the pandemic strikes (Azar II 2020).

Second, the vaccine success in 2020 is in turn in large part attributable to the advances in microbiology, medicine, and virology accomplished and dominated by the universities and research centers in the most capitalist economy, say, the US (Kariko et al. 2011; Pardi et al. 2018).