In a presentation from 2020,
Louise Lassalle, [Open Insulin Foundation’s] communication manager, gave a breakdown of
the equipment needed to make insulin on a medium scale — in bigger
batches than are possible on the benchtop, but far, far smaller than
what commercial biologics plants are capable of. It’s not cheap — about
$1 million worth of gear. But, that investment would produce enough
insulin for 14,000 diabetics, meaning that a functioning,
community-level insulin factory could conceivably be funded for about
$70 per person. And that factory would produce insulin at around $6 a
vial, taking into account everything from raw materials to salaries,
rent, and utilities.
Granted, there are huge and potentially insurmountable legal and
regulatory hurdles with this plan. It may well be that the insulin
industry, with a vested interest in keeping prices high — at least in
the United States — will let fly their legal dogs of war, and shut this
group down if they ever get close to realizing their goal. And they’ll
certainly have to deal with the Food and Drug Administration if they
ever expect to actually use their insulin on humans. On the other hand,
the efforts of the Open Insulin Foundation and other biohackers working
on alternative sources of insulin might just win in the long run, by
showing that making insulin just isn’t as hard as we’ve perhaps been
lead to believe, and that maybe scaling everything up to massive
proportions isn’t always in the best interests of the consumer, even if
it’s profitable business.
This leads to another, possibly more important point. If the last
year and a half have taught us nothing else, it’s that long supply
chains need to be looked at with skepticism. When a pharmaceutical
company builds a mega factory for financial reasons, it creates a single
point of failure that probably doesn’t need to be there. We’ve seen how
easily supply lines can be pinched, and it seems incredibly foolish to
engineer into a system the potential to shut down the world’s supply of
any medicine, especially one as vital as insulin. OIF’s vision of
distributed mini-factories for insulin production seems smarter right
now, and will probably only seem like a better idea as time goes on and
complex systems become less and less reliable.
“American Indians made great sacrifices and suffered great losses as a result of the American Revolution. White Anericans remember the event as securing their liberty; for Native Americans it represented another step toward the loss of their freedom. At the end of the war, the British and the Americans signed the Peace of Paris, ignoring the Indians who had been their allies and their enemies. Britain handed Indian lands to the United States and left Indian people to confront the renewed American assaults on their land and culture.”
A damning new report shows that one of the leading COVID-19 vaccine makers appears to have played a role in restricting access to those very vaccines. The report, “Pfizer’s Power,” published this week by the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, examines Pfizer’s contracts with the United States, United Kingdom, European Commission, Albania, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Dominican Republic and Peru. They offer a rare glimpse into the power Pfizer has to silence governments, throttle supply, shift risk and maximize profits in the middle of a public health crisis.
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