“  There is no disease that Allah has created, except that He also has created its treatment.” (Sahih Al-Bukhari)
The outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus in West Africa that has killed thousands of people so far has only become an issue of concern since reports of individuals from the West being infected with the disease have surfaced. Even then, the response of the international community has been far from optimum, with UN officials reporting that a $1 billion appeal to fight Ebola has only been 25% funded. Stephen Hall, a CEO of a pharmaceutical company explains why: “Traditional investors have not been enthusiastic about funding the development of a vaccine that, until now, has been a third-world problem.” He adds, “Even now that Ebola has entered other countries, the traditional investor has still not shown much interest. They are just driven too much by economic considerations.” The neglect of research due to the lack of financial incentives into the Ebola virus for almost 40 years, is indicative of the priorities of the pharmaceutical industry, placing profits before human life.
Pharmaceutical companies driven by profit margins are not designed to make decisions based on saving human life, but strictly on increasing economic yield, as Dr John Ashton, President of the UK faculty of Public Health correctly identified. “We must also tackle the scandal of the unwillingness of the pharmaceutical industry to invest in research to produce treatments and vaccines, something they refuse to do because the numbers involved are, in their terms, so small, and don’t justify the investment. This is the moral bankruptcy of capitalism acting in the absence of an ethical and social framework.”
Year on year, pharmaceutical companies rake in huge profits, from 2003 to 2012, the world’s largest 11 drug companies (Big Pharma) made a net profit of $711.4 billion. In 2012 alone, Big Pharma earned nearly $85 billion in net profits. According to IMS health, a worldwide leader in health care research, the global market for pharmaceuticals is expected to top $1 trillion in sales by 2014. You would expect therefore, that the number of life saving drugs would have increased due to an increase in R&D; however, this is not the case. Only a handful of important drugs have been brought to the market in recent years and they were mostly funded by taxpayer funded research at academic institutions, small biotechnology companies or the NIH (National Institute of Health). The majority of new drugs are variations of older drugs known as “Me-Too” drugs that are simply marketed as revolutionary. Pharmaceutical companies are amongst the top Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) advertising spenders in the world; in 2013, Big Pharma spent $3.6 billion on DTC expenditure.
Like all industries in capitalism, the free market economy has allowed the pharmaceutical industry to exercise power, political might and social influence over a country’s governments, health care networks, doctors and hospitals as well as define the narrative of treatments i.e. what is needed and what is not needed, such as the Ebola Virus. Moreover, Big Pharma spent almost $2.7 billion on lobbying expenses from 1998-2013, more than any other industry and 42% higher than the insurance industry, which is the second highest paying. In the United States, the industry contributes heavily to the Food and Drug Administration, which is responsible for regulating the drugs and devices made by the same companies.
This culpability of ebola rests not only with the pharmaceutical industry, but the world powers that only paid attention to the outbreak once people in the West were infected, even though the disease has been spreading since December 2013 between parts of West Africa including Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. It was only in the last four weeks that President Obama ramped up his response, creating the fear of a global pandemic and distrustfully assigned three thousand US military personnel to the strategic location of Africa to supply medical and logistical support. The UK has now followed suit, sending in hundreds of troops including aircrafts and warships to the ebola infected region of West Africa. The victims and future victims of the Ebola virus are not just victims of the disease, but victims of the voracity of Capitalism. A system that views individuals as statistics that can be erased; not humans with needs that need addressing. This is why a disease that has been known about for over 40 years has been largely ignored.
If we take other narratives into consideration, we see similar and differing views towards the human. The Marxist narrative is similar to capitalism, with a materialistic world view. Man is viewed materially, within the prism of a kind of machinery which can be dispensed of. This thought was fundamentally behind the massacres of communist and fascist leaders such as Stalin and Hitler. No major medical breakthroughs are associated with the Soviet Union, a fact that could be attributed to a reasonable degree, to the dehumanizing nature of communism.  
There is a great need for humans to be humanized again, for ideologies to be embraced that give significance to the sacredness of all human life; so that people are considered relevant, and not secondary to profit margins.

n    The writer is an assistant professor of political science at LUMS.