Owning the Sun: A People's History of Monopoly Medicine from Aspirin to COVID-19 Vaccines by Alexander Zaitchik
Owning the Sun: A People’s History of Monopoly Medicine from Aspirin to COVID-19 Vaccines (Counterpoint Press), written by journalist Alexander Zaitchik, tells the story of one of the most contentious fights in human history: the legal right to produce lifesaving medicines.
In the book, Zaitchik lays the foundation by establishing the facts: Medical science began as a discipline geared toward the betterment of all human life, but the merging of research with intellectual property and the rise of the pharmaceutical industry warped and eventually undermined its ethical foundations.
Since World War II, federally funded research has facilitated most major medical breakthroughs, yet these drugs are often wholly controlled by price-gouging corporations with growing international ambitions. This leads Zaitchik to several questions: Why does the U.S. government fund the development of medical science in the name of the public only to relinquish exclusive rights to drug companies, and how does such a system impoverish us, weaken our responses to crises, and, as in the cases of AIDS and COVID-19, put the world at risk?
The negotiations that resulted in the globalization of U.S.-style medical monopoly were not so much held over a table as conducted on a rack,” says Zaitchik. “It was the only way to enforce a concept as peculiar and universally rejected as rent-seeking from medicines. This is the story of how one of history’s worst ideas took root against centuries of tradition and came to dominate the world.”
Outlining how generations of public health and science advocates have attempted to hold the line against Big Pharma and their allies in government, Alexander Zaitchik’s first-of-its-kind history documents the rise of privatized medicine in the United States and its subsequent globalization.
From the controversial arrival of patent-wielding German drug firms in the late 19th century to present-day coordination between industry and philanthropic organizations — including the influential Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — that stymie international efforts to vaccinate the world against COVID-19, Owning the Sun tells one of the most important and least understood histories of our time.
