When the WHO announced it was trialing the first-ever treatment against the Bundibugyo ebola disease ravaging the Congo, the real tech behind the medicine didn’t come from the organization but from a San Diego pharma company, founded in 2003, called Mapp. Most lifesaving medicines are developed in the United States, which leads the world in drug patents and biotech pipelines. Other major research powerhouses include China, the United Kingdom, Japan, and Switzerland. Together with Germany and France, these nations supply the vast majority of medicines in the world today.
The reason for this is simple. In order to produce the candidate vaccine, there must be a whole ecosystem that supports innovation, from the lonely researcher or inventor to the intellectual property lawyer. There must be government grants and angel investors; there must be financial markets. Finally, production requires an industrial base that can provide scale-up expertise, manufacturing, regulatory navigation, and distribution.
What we see on the news is a WHO doctor providing a treatment. That is a laudable thing, and credit where credit is due, but it is the tip of the iceberg. Behind the jab, there is an entire civilization at work to produce the Bundibugyo medicine. When facing an "unknown disease" (often called a "Disease X" in medical research), scientists must first determine if the pathogen is a virus, bacteria, or other agent. It is potentially a complex, high-risk, and lengthy endeavor that could take 10 to 15 years and cost billions of dollars, with a success rate of less than 1% from early research to final approval. It’s a daunting task, but after a time, some nations and some cultures become good at problem solving.
In contrast to civilizations based on creating value, which manifests itself in increasing levels of human capital and complexity, there are civilizations that are founded on looting and entropy. Why create when you can take? Historically, cultures that supported themselves via extortion and piracy have included the Norsemen, the Barbary Corsairs, and the Pirates of the Caribbean. There were the Eurasian steppe nomads, the Bedouin and related Arab tribes, the Comanches of the Great Plains, and the Anglo-Scottish border reivers. Most fell into decline, having been outcompeted by more productive societies, but some raiding cultures have survived, notably the pirates off Somalia and the Houthis on the Red Sea.
But by and large, the world needs the skills of the developed world. The vaccine example illustrates that, in the grand scheme of things, the West, despite the hatred directed at it by progressives, is the workshop of the global south. It invents medicine, cell phones, computers, airplanes, high-yielding crops, transportation, long shelf-life food, etc., that even the pirates use, and without which the lives of people in the Third World could not be lengthened to historically unheard-of heights. Life expectancy at birth in Africa has risen to approximately 64.2 years, marking an increase of almost two decades since the 1970s. Lifespan on the continent has improved dramatically from historic lows of 26 to 37 years in the mid-20th century, driven largely by successful public health measures. Absent these underpinnings, the stage collapses.
The importance of value-producing cultures is increasing rather than declining with the advance of technology. The recent UN proposal to regulate artificial intelligence (AI) is a backhanded acknowledgement that many major civilization-changing developments in the last half century, such as GPS, the Internet, and AI, have passed through three stages:
They begin as an evil invention of the U.S. military-industrial complex;
They become so indispensable to the world that living without them is unthinkable.
They finally grow too important to be left in the hands of their inventors, and calls grow for their control by the United Nations.
It is possible that access to low-Earth orbit and the exploitation of space resources will follow the same path as GPS, the Internet, and AI. Today, they are a "waste of money that could be spent on welfare," but one day, they will be a "human right" whose provision must be guaranteed by the United Nations.
Progressives don't take this into account when they argue instead for the voluntary extinction of Western civilization. German progressive activist Verena Brunschweiger argued that, since a German child consumes resources equivalent to those of 30 African children on average, and up to 500 in Burundi, the logical thing to do is eliminate German children. “We have a proud slogan, ‘My bloodline ends with me,’” Brunschweiger says. “I think this is a responsible choice.” Actually, it is a stupid choice, for then who would find a cure and manufacture the Bundibugyo vaccine? How many Congolese would die then?
It takes all kinds to make a world. Even the pharmaceutical, computer, and space industries despised by progressives may have something to contribute, and Brunschweiger should acknowledge that possibility – for the sake of diversity, at least.
Related: The Stranger by the Fire: Multiculturalism in Ireland
Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump and his administration’s bold leadership, we are respected on the world stage, and our enemies are being put on notice.
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