Jordan Peterson & Half-baked Corporate Critiques
“… a new (Covid) variant is announced when pharmaceutical company share prices dip.”(1) — Jordan Peterson, 12/8/2021
This quote encapsulates what happens when someone who is a lifelong vehement champion of the capitalism opportunistically decides to offer a Marxist-style take on an urgent social crisis. The line sounds good; it is dramatic, even scandalous, and given what we know about what has been done in the name of profit over the last 500 years (slavery, genocide, war), it is theoretically possible. It’s just not logistically or scientifically possible.
Upon examination, the remark reveals itself as sensationalist and adolescent. 1) It is factually wrong. The emergence of Omicron did not affect pharmaceutical company stock prices nor is there any evidence to suggest that the discovery and lethal spread of the Delta and Omicron variants were preceded by dips in the market prices of Pfizer, Moderna, Astra Zeneca and Johnson and Johnson. 2) Pharmaceutical companies do not need to somehow collude with tens of thousands of hospitals, doctors, research labs, science journalists, investigative journalists, crisis actors and politicians across the world to conjure a fake new viral strain and somehow portray it as two-to-four times more transmissible (Omicron) or far more deadly (Delta) than previous strains of the virus in order to make unthinkable sums of money.
All they must do is continue to do what they are doing. Moderna received a total of $2.5 billion from the US government in funding and in pledges to purchase doses, while Pfizer agreed to sell $1.9 billion in doses to the federal government in July 2020. And now, the companies refuse to share the patent (to let it go generic, essentially) with manufacturers not contracted to them. So, the vaccine cannot be produced affordably and efficiently in the global south and Pfizer and Moderna continue to make 100% of the profits off of the sale of the life-saving vaccines produced using their formulas indefinitely. Seemingly insane situations like this are a feature and not a bug of capitalism, under which corporations legally must prioritize shareholder profit as their overriding objective.
So, why doesn’t Jordan Peterson just offer the actual, true critique of the moral crime that the pharmaceutical companies are perpetrating? It seems to be just as sensational and scandalous as the fantasy he alleges. This is because the actual critique contains an indictment of the system itself. Playing by the currently legal rules of the global market — rules for which Bill Gates lobbied the World Health Organization vigorously to maintain — Pfizer and Moderna do not have to share the patent for the vaccine with anybody, even when this means people who need it cannot afford it and will therefore suffer and die and even when this likely means that new variants of the Covid virus will continue to emerge out of regions with low vaccination rates.
This posture is rampant. It is at the heart of the pseudo-populism of the contemporary American right, manifest in such charlatans as Trump, JD Vance, Tucker Carlson and Matt Gaetz. These characters make noises about being "for the American people," and against corporate media, big pharma and big tech, but their stances on universal healthcare, climate change, minimum wage, unions, police violence and more tell a different story. Crises emerge, but people on the right and mainstream Democrats cannot admit the actual source of the crisis, either because their identities are too fused with the ideology being criticized or due to other material and social status incentives that are served by privileging the cloak-and-dagger, Alex Jones-esque interpretation instead of the crisis.
