The Biden administration in the US declared that temporarily, it will be disallowing patent rights charges on vaccines that have been developed to combat Covid-19. The pharmaceutical industry was not amused. The decision is expected to reduce the production expense needed for the outturn of vaccines so that their distribution and price in so-called Third World countries should become cheaper.

The Europeans had started to discuss a similar initiative but the US President’s decision caught them short.

Once again, the episode demonstrated how the US administration is giving full priority to social policy, and as in the immigration sector, has persisted in this even when its approaches ran into problems.

Many fail to understand how a country which gives first place to the “free market” can be run by a government with a social commitment. This for them has become even less intelligible since the time when President Reagan was the foremost promoter of the thesis that only the market knows best.

However the US also embodies a long tradition of ideas, movements and projects built on the greatest social commitment coupled to novel ways of mobilisation.

***

RECOVERY PROGRAMMES

The European Union is planning to spend many many billions of euros on projects meant to bolster and help the recovery of member states’ economies: they will be meant to counter and compensate for the huge destruction caused by the pandemic. Till there was agreement on how the funds were to be doled out and how financial responsibility for them was to be carried, all quarters involved in the discussion insisted on introducing a wide range of conditions to determine how projects were to be selected and how they would be run.

It seems to me that many of these conditions are so wide-ranging and stringent at different points that one finds it difficult to understand how the recovery funds being targeted could all be spent in time. Yet, the emphasis has long been on the urgent need for initiatives to proceed fast in order not to prevent European economies from crumbling.

***

AIRLINES

There is a lack of coherence in the EU’s competition policy, especially as it relates to airlines.

State aids are supposedly banned for such enterprises, except under certain conditions. Yet when at issue there is the difficult financial situation of one of the major air carriers, a way is soon found by which to stretch these conditions.

While it is repeatedly being said that airlines should respect the rules of the free market, there is also the belief that for Europe to compete with the airlines of other regions, it should encourage the development of 3 to 4  world scale “champions”. It is difficult to understand how this strategy can be followed while respecting free market rules.

Another proviso that gets referenced covers European funds and state aids meant to safeguard entrprises that have been badly affected by Covid-19. These should not be deployed in favour of firms which were already close to bankruptcy prior to the pandemic, so we are told. On the basis of this rule, Covid aid funds should in practice not be extended at all to any European airline.