From Bryn Glover, Kirkby Malzeard, North Yorkshire, UK
MacKenzie leaves to the end of her report the observation that ideology has frowned on governments messing with markets. Recent history has thrown up numerous examples of the private suppliers of essential services needing to appeal to public funds to bail them out of self-inflicted crises.
An enterprise supposedly founded on the double principle of honouring public service demands and private profit demands can work quite happily during times of plenty. But during crunches, when one principle needs to take precedence over the other, it is inevitably the one related to profit that will prevail.
Bringing the UK rail network back under public ownership and control seems a popular response to its crises. I plead that the same should happen with the manufacture of medicines. As MacKenzie notes, until the 1980s, government agencies produced public-health vaccines. There are enormous difficulties in doing this with transnational corporations, but that shouldn’t stop us.
