Dutch corporate privatisation stopped coronavirus vaccine development

This 18 December 2019 video about Britain says about itself:

On this episode of Going Underground, we speak to legendary journalist and filmmaker John Pilger on his film ‘The Dirty War on the NHS’.

He discusses the issue of the film not being allowed to air during the general election and questions the role of OFCOM as a regulator, the negative impact of management consultants, how the Health and Social Care Act of 2012 opened the door to NHS privatisation, how privatisation causes money to be wasted in the NHS despite more funding promises, the reality of the private healthcare system in the United States, R.A.M volunteering in the US, the 2019 UK general election, the reason why Brexit has been taken over by the extreme right since 2016, anti-Semitism allegations against Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, allegations of BBC bias against the Labour Party in the election and more!

John Pilger- The Dirty War on the NHS: Privatisation, Profits and the Impact on Patients

Translated from Dutch weekly De Groene, 1 April 2020:

Investigation: How the Netherlands largely dismantled its vaccine knowledge

“You would not sell the fire brigade, would you?”

Vaccine development is a task of the government. However, the Netherlands has sold vaccine production to a big pharmaceutical corporation that does not invest in research. “If we would have continued then, we would have had a corona vaccine much faster now.”

Also, other European governments dismantled their vaccine research by selling it to private Big Pharma corporations.

In Dutch daily De Volkskrant, 1 April 2020, columnist Sheila Sitalsing reacted to this. And to the claim of Dutch Prime Minister Rutte, of the pro-Big Business VVD party, that government policies during the coronavirus crisis were supposedly ‘socialist’:

There were quite a few surprised reactions, because what was so ‘deeply socialist’ about ten years of dismantling the welfare state, cutting back on youth care, pinching off social workshops, shouting ‘Pull your own weight!‘ to people without hands, mercilessly witch-hunting innocent recipients of childcare allowance, forcing the unemployed to scour old trainsets until they get ill [from chromium-6 disease], and in the meantime making deals with Shell and Unilever about the abolition of dividend tax. On the other hand, Rutte is of course right that we have a semi-communist way of life in the eyes of places where a more brutal form of capitalism is adhered to. Like the United States of America, where sick people without health insurance are unlucky.

UPDATE 16 April 2020: during coronavirus crisis, the Dutch government stopped planned further privatisation of vaccine research: here.

Market and profits impede COVID-19 vaccine effort: here.