I hope you read that title to the tune of the Beatles’ Come Together.

I have some thoughts around Coronavirus, and what’s going on in our world today, and thought I’d start sharing those here. This one revolves around how much Capitalism has to gain from the access to a vaccine.

The vaccine for this virus equates to money in the pockets of business owners. So it would behoove major corporations that would benefit from this, to pitch in money to expedite research/development of the vaccine.

Off the top of my head, I’m thinking of McDonald’s, Darden restaurants, Walmart, etc. Restaurants have the most to gain from us going back “the old normal”. Saying the old normal, hoping to eventually say “in the olden days” as I hope we do better than what we were doing before. And these restaurants in particular made their money by not compensating employees properly (in wages and benefits), whilst wooing the working class to their restaurants.

While Walmart does offer competitive packages to their managerial level, the majority of workers don’t earn enough. They are in the same category as those above, most of their consumers are working class, and they keep majority of their profits by not compensating the majority of their employees.

I’m sure they are making a FRACTION of what would normally, so chipping in some capital to get the vaccine sooner means they would go back to making BILLIONS sooner.

So, that’s step one: researching & developing a vaccine.

Step two is making that vaccine accessible to the consumers (the mass public). This means FREE, accessible vaccines to all that want it. This won’t mean no more new Coronavirus of course, because many won’t take it, but it’s something at least.

Lastly, I did look up the profits of the companies I mentioned, because let’s not kid ourselves, we all knew I was going to. Each has had profits in the billions for the last decade. And have so much to gain if we go back to the old days. I also made a nifty little collage of them, because that’s also what I do.

As I said, these were the 1st that came to my head. I know there are plenty of others.

• McDonald’s made $21 billion to $28 billion consistently between 2013-2019 (those were the years I looked up)
• Darden Restaurants made $5-8 billion annually the last decade.
• Walmart’s profits came in at $400-$523 billion a year for the last decade.