Yeah, I think what Senator Sanders is doing there is highlighting the moral and pragmatic absurdities of for-profit medicine, as he has always done so well. Of course, the question around the vaccine is notional at this point, because there isn’t a vaccine. And best-case scenario, we’re a couple of years out from that moment when we would be talking about universal rollout.
When that happens, I think we should all remember Jonas Salk’s famous answer to the question about whether, after he invented the polio vaccine, whether — he was asked whether it would be patented. And he said, “Would you patent the sun?” So I think that that should absolutely be the approach that we take.
But within the system of for-profit medicine, at every stage, whether it is the production of essential medical equipment or whether it is the delivery of services, that is responsible for a huge number of deaths within the U.S. response.
We’re hearing — we heard Dr. Fauci, just now, talk about needless mass death if the economy opens up too soon. And it is already opening up too soon in many states. But the truth of the matter is, because of a refusal to listen to earlier warnings from experts like him, there has already been needless mass deaths, you know, by some estimates an excess death of 50,000 people as of today in the United States, because the U.S. government did not listen to warnings, was not looking at what was happening in the rest of the world, completely blew the head start it had in tackling this virus.
— source democracynow.org | May 13, 2020