 Anthony Costello is the former director at the World Health Organization of Maternal and Child Health and he penned an op-ed for The Guardian and he comes up with an idea that I think is really, really, brilliant and important. So all of these countries, Germany, the UK, who are blocking the trip's waiver, quite literally stopping other countries from having the ability of manufacturing their own generic versions of COVID-19 vaccines, they should be prosecuted under the International Criminal Court. He floated this idea, I hadn't previously thought about it and he makes a really strong case for it and I'm all on board now. So here's what he writes, The UK, Canada, Germany and other EU states have supported a deliberate policy to withhold vaccines from the poorest countries in the world and defended an immoral and unethical economic system which places big pharma patents ahead of millions of lives. In this context is the only option left to ask whether states facilitating this might be prosecuted in the International Criminal Court on the grounds of a crime against humanity. The situation is dire and yet one year after the discovery of multiple effective vaccines we still face a vaccine apartheid. Patent protected vaccines are sold at great profit to wealthy countries by a few pharmaceutical companies. The global vaccine price ranges from $2 for AstraZeneca to $37 per dose with mRNA vaccines such as Pfizer and Biontech and Moderna, the most expensive. Between January of 2020 and December of 2021, the market capitalizations of Moderna rose from $6.9 billion to $134 billion, Pfizer from $206 billion to $314 billion, and Biontech from $6.6 billion to $84 billion. So these pharmaceutical companies have profited heavily from these vaccines, heavily. But that's still not enough. They still want to protect their profits and lots of countries also want to help them pad their pockets. I mean, global capitalism has been a disaster and this is one of the most explicit examples of that. I mean, aside from anthropogenic climate change, but still, I mean, this is all about money. It's all about greed. And it's going to kill people. People will unnecessarily die because countries are protecting the profits of pharmaceutical giants. It's truly morally reprehensible on so many levels. Now, COVAX has failed. The goal was to distribute 2 billion vaccines globally and they haven't even hit 700 million. So the question is, if that failed, and the only option left really is to make sure that these countries have a patent waiver so they can manufacture their own generic versions of the COVID-19 vaccines, but they're not doing that. What do you do? Well, you prosecute them. You force them to do it because what they are doing right now is a crime against humanity. Here's the specific case that Costello lays out. He argues this leaves the nuclear option prosecution in the International Criminal Court for Crimes Against Humanity. In Article 7-1 of the Rome Statute, these are described as widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population and inhumane acts intentionally causing great suffering or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health. International lawyers should consider this option and act quickly. We cannot let this carnage drag on. We could see another 12 million deaths in the next year. People across the world want justice. They should have a right to vaccine access, especially when many of the vaccines in question were researched and developed largely by government scientists trained and employed at taxpayers' expense. Anyone standing in the way of saving lives in the name of private profits should be held responsible. Yeah. So he made a really solid case there and I feel like it's hard to figure out what to do, right? Because our government, the US government, Joe Biden's administration ostensibly supports the trip's waiver. And I say ostensibly because he endorsed it multiple times, but yet he's not really pressuring his allies at the WTO to push for it. But I mean, what do you do to affect change in other countries? And this is one really good option. You prosecute them. I believe all of these countries are signatories to the International Criminal Court. The US is not. But these other countries are. So if you're an international lawyer and you want to prosecute these countries for committing a crime against humanity, I think you have a really solid case and it's at least worth a shot, right? Because what else is there to do because of these vaccine patents? Who knows? How many more preventable deaths will occur in developing countries? It's it's it's an embarrassment. It's an embarrassment as a human being that we're so primitive still that we care more about money and profits of pharmaceutical companies than human lives. It's just late-stage capitalism, global capitalism. I don't think it's hyperbolic to call it a death cult because that's what it is when you prioritize profits over people and you know that suffering is happening and you see it and you do nothing because you don't want to hurt profits. That's a death cult. That's a death cult. You're choosing death over life and you deserve to be prosecuted for it. So I hope that somebody takes up this case as an international lawyer. I have no idea, right? I'm not a legal scholar. I don't know whether or not this would happen. I mean, the ICC has been criticized because it disproportionately kind of targets crimes against humanity in African countries and doesn't really go after developing countries. But maybe somebody will take it up. It's worth a shot because what else can we do?