Before 1955, millions of children all over the world died from or were paralysed by Polio.
After a massive public funding drive in America, a vaccine was finally invented.
Polio would still be striking down millions today, if it wasn’t for one small, yet surprising act of selflessness.
The reason Polio was eradicated from the face of the earth was because the man who figured it out, decided not to patent it, instead gifting it to the children of the world.
In fact, when Jonas Salk was asked about it at the time, he responded with: “The people own the patent. Can you patent the sun?”
It was an act that astonished his peers (and big pharmaceutical companies, I’m sure), but endeared him to the people, especially parents.
Patenting the vaccine would’ve assured him instant wealth and he wouldn’t have had to work another day in his life.
And I don’t think anyone living in a society driven by profits would’ve begrudged him that.
But the cost would’ve meant some children not getting the vaccine, and he saw the ethical principle more valuable than riches.
I tell you this story because parts of the world are currently being vaccinated against Coronavirus.
And in the next six months, we may be getting our first batch here. By now you would have seen that Britain started inoculations last week and Canada may follow soon.
This is of course the official tried-and-tested vaccine.
While China and Russia both have their own, which they are giving their citizens, both countries are being excluded from the global vaccine hype.
And that’s because they didn’t follow the approvals processes demanded and valued by western nations.
But we mustn't forget that both countries are distributing their own vaccines widely.
In fact, China has already exported its vaccine to Indonesia by the millions, while Hungary and Brazil are very interested in Russia’s vaccine.
But there's one aspect of this that not many people are talking about, and that's the fact that this vaccine does not come cheaply.
Our government is spending R2.2 billion to vaccinate just 10% of the population.
Even if the six million doses are distributed evenly between our nine provinces, the Western Cape will still get less than a million.
We mustn't get excited, as there are six million of us, which means most of us will not be getting it.
It will first go to frontline healthcare workers and vulnerable citizens, like the elderly.
While that is obviously a good thing, it is also a frightening indictment that the choice of potential life and death must be made based solely in the interest of profit.
Put bluntly, people will die because our government cannot afford more of this vaccine.
That makes this a striking magnification of the calculated coldness of capitalism; a system that thrives on greed and that demands profits at any cost – even the misery of others.
There is simply no human activity that a pure capitalist will not look to monetise somehow.
It costs to be born and it costs to die; and neither is cheap.
And while we’ve come to accept that the life in between is expensive, we must also accept that the fight to stay alive is now also in the hands of a capitalist, with not one altruistic bone in his body.
Whatever future pandemics the world faces, somebody will find a way to make money from it. But we are so far down this rabbit hole already, that there’s no turning back. Or is there?
There’s an argument that patent laws incentivise innovation. In other words, people will stop dreaming up innovations, if their inventions are not protected so that they can make millions from it.
Hundreds of clever minds have proven this theory wrong over the years.
Tim Berners-Lee is one of them. He dreamed up the internet in its current form and wrote the first algorithms to make it work.
Best of all, he gifted it to the world as an invention to advance humanity.
Just imagine if he had to earn just one cent every time someone in the world sent a WhatsApp message, laughed at a meme or went online to watch a video.
There are some inventions that are simply too profoundly impactful to be tied to profits.
Just think about it. What if someone one day came up with something that would ensure every person got fed a meal every day.
The people who would least be able to afford it, are the people who need it most.