The Rich Won the Pandemic. Now They Must Pay

Author John Nichols and the cover of his new book. [Both images courtesy of Verso Books]

Coronavirus Criminals and Pandemic Profiteers, a new book by journalist John Nichols, addresses the ways that elites in the U.S. have used the pandemic to advance their own interests – and how people can force accountability.

Over the phone, we spoke about Trump, Big Pharma, billionaires and Biden’s pandemic response. “I want people to get angry, I want people to get passionate, and I want people to demand change. Because one of the things I learned … was that we're going to have more pandemics. The reality is that they will come more frequently and perhaps be more severe,” he said.

“We have both a moral and a practical responsibility to seek accountability in this moment so that when the next pandemic comes, we don't have hundreds of thousands of deaths [and millions of infections] that did not need to occur.” (This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

Who are the pandemic profiteers and coronavirus criminals?

When the pandemic hit, it was clear very quickly that either the country and its economic and political leaders would recognize the need for shared sacrifice to beat this incredible threat, or that working-class and poor people would suffer immensely while those in positions of power advanced their own self-interest. Unfortunately, we took the path in which the wealthy and powerful served themselves.

The pandemic was much worse than it should have been because our elected leaders chose to lie to the American people and failed to intervene at critical stages. At the top of the list, of course, are President Trump and members of his administration. People in positions of great economic security, like Jeff Bezos, chose to use the pandemic to make themselves much richer, rather than to take actions that might have saved lives and improved the circumstances of a great many Americans.

What were some less-obvious examples of this happening?

There were courts across the country that had to opine on battles between different political entities and officials. And there were too many cases in which state supreme courts, and even the U.S. Supreme Court, failed to intervene on behalf of public health and public safety, often with devastating results.

In a number of cases, for instance, Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Bradley and her fellow conservative justices threw out pandemic protections for people in Wisconsin. Justice Bradley also absurdly compared mask mandates and social distancing requirements to the internment of the Japanese during World War II. It's a terrible comparison, and yet some people on the right continue to use it.

How has this level of corruption been allowed to go unchecked?

This isn't really about Donald Trump or Jeff Bezos or Biden. It's about a system that allows the wealthy and the powerful to opt out of the rules that apply to the rest of us.

During the pandemic, working-class and poor people were told that they needed to keep doing their jobs without sufficient protection. I interviewed many workers who said that they did so not only out of a need to support their families, but also out of a duty to society. Juxtapose that with the country’s billionaire class, who resisted regulations and protections, wanted a liability shield to prevent them from being sued if they did the wrong things, and retreated to their waterfront villas and country homes.

Billionaires have increased their wealth by $2 trillion since the start of the pandemic. This was the best of times for billionaires and the worst of times for the working class, poor folks who are risking their lives.

A failure to hold the powerful accountable is a flaw in the system that has gotten worse over time. Ronald Reagan wasn't held to account for Iran-Contra. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were not held to account for the Iraq War, or for the steps they took that ended up partly causing the economic meltdown of 2007-2008. Our political class walks away without being held to account for their mistakes and misdoings.

One year into the Biden administration, what parallels have you seen in the pandemic response?

I think many of Joe Biden’s initial executive orders, including his advocacy for the American Rescue Plan, were quite appropriate, and I give him credit for that. But the Biden Administration has a host of responsibilities, some of which they have not fulfilled.

For instance, it is not enough for the administration to say that the pharmaceutical companies should do a better job sharing vaccines. These companies were drawn into researching and producing vaccines with huge amounts of government support. Ultimately, Pfizer, Moderna and BioNTech ended up making $1,000 a second, $65,000 a minute, $93 million a day. And Pfizer says they can't share the vaccine because they don't want to give up their so-called intellectual property rights and make vaccines more readily available to everyone around the world. A company like Pfizer is unlikely to change course unless the U.S. government becomes far more aggressive when it comes to negotiating contracts, taxing excess profits and coordinating with other governments to demand that vaccine recipes be shared.

Similarly, the Biden administration has talked about increasing taxes on the very wealthy, but they haven't proposed levels that would make sense. People debated whether we could afford the “Build Back Better Act.” Well, if we simply taxed back the $2 trillion that American billionaires gained, we’d have enough money to pay for it.

Above all, Biden and his administration have made the same mistake that we've seen many times in the past: When you replace a bad actor like Trump, there's a tendency to say, “We're going to move forward.” Joe Biden and Democrats – who control the House and Senate – should have aggressively sought out accountability for Trump administration members and for people in the private sector who did wrong during the pandemic. Not doing so creates a fantasy that a pandemic, like an economic meltdown or many other very difficult events, is a natural disaster. That is, that it’s something that just happens, which individuals can’t have any control over. And that’s just not true.

How does this cycle of impunity stop?

When Franklin Roosevelt was president, he investigated the bankers and the big financial actors that had taken advantage of the early stages of the Great Depression. In some cases his administration prosecuted them, in other cases they were fined. But all of those institutions were subject to new regulations and approaches to governance. In the 1930s into the 1940s, we had a real change in course as a country. And that lasted for a long time, until the Clinton and Bush administrations undid a lot of that regulation.

But we shouldn’t expect some great man or woman to come in and make change. People have to demand it. People have to say “no more,” and it has to become a part of our politics and our activism.

What might accountability look like?

We should be open to the idea that there are many, many forms of accountability. Some might happen through criminal or civil prosecution, others could happen through legislation, taxation or regulation. One of the first steps that we could and should take is to change our tax policies in order to claw back some of those trillions of dollars that were redistributed upward to the very, very wealthy.

I also think we need to understand that accountability has a political component. We should accept that the people who failed us during the pandemic should never hold elected office again. That’s the duty of the voters.

When we hold people to account, we expose wrongdoing, and that leads to new regulations, rules, approaches and, ideally, to a new attitude in society that holds that those who are in positions of power have a responsibility to serve the great mass of humanity – not just themselves.

What would allow us to handle pandemics better?

We could look to countries around the world that did a better job. You need a national health care system with a single-payer, Medicare-for-All model. You need a social welfare state that is prepared to deal with devastating circumstances, particularly in terms of caring for children and the elderly. And you need planning. It's amazing the extent to which the United States refuses to plan for the future. If we had planned to the extent that many countries did, we would have had a much better system for acquiring protective gear and respirators. And by extension, we would be able to ensure that people are fed and housed and cared for.

That's the great challenge: Will we learn how to put ourselves in better circumstances? And if we don't, then what we saw with this pandemic will be just a prelude to something far more jarring.