Or without a massive corporation behind them, you wouldn’t be able to massively upscale production.
That is a plausible argument, but it wasn’t really mentioned in that article about Gates (if it was, I missed it). I was referring to what was in snoreo’s link.
Sorry this has been discussed before. The whole bill gates is out to get the third world is ridiculous tbh. While drug companies are easy targets for a lot of the things they do, the vaccine production stuff is more clickbait than good criticism. What the pharmaceutical industry has done wrt covid vaccination is a god damn miracle.
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Last estimate I saw said it will be years before a lot of these places can get vaccines the way the manufacturers are going. That’s hundreds of thousands of extra deaths.
Yeah they did a great job and they’ve made a fucking boatload. Are they not going to bother making vaccines in the future if they can’t squeeze every last fucking penny? Of course they will, because America will still pay them boatloads.
Hell, we will probably need booster shots yearly and they will make insane amounts of money.
I’d have to look into this further because I’m not 100% sure, but I’m fairly certain that the current hold up in vaccine production has nothing to do with patent protections. Raw materials, tech, and people with the skills necessary to produce the various vaccines are where the shortage is. There isn’t, and again afaik, labs sitting on the plans of pfizer vaccinations just waiting for the legal ability to actually make the vaccines. Shortages are largely based on the other things I mentioned.
America isn’t the only one paying ‘boatloads’, everyone is. On the other hand, it’s what might be the most impressive technological achievement of all time. Seems like money well spent.
I get that you don’t like drug companies and, like I said, that’s a target rich environment. I don’t think, however, that you’re going to make a pretty persuasive argument that they’re bad because of patent stuff. The covid vaccine story, like it or not, is a great success story of what private drug companies can do given that so far it seems like one of, if not the, most impressive engineering feats of all time.*
*Noting that this work wasn’t all private of course, but a massive chunk of it still was.
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It’s pretty much Conservatism 101: people are venal scum who won’t lift a finger without profiting personally.
Well, this is true of the people that run large global corporations.
I think you’re probably right but I wanted to highlight that there is a more plausible variation on this where Gates and people like him legitimately want to help the third world but through a combination of hubris plus a well practiced habit of defending the capitalist system that made them wealthy they are taking steps that are actually bad for the third world. We see this pattern all the time among, for example, our beloved establishment Democrat politicians who probably would like to see better outcomes for poor people but are beholden to corporate interests first and foremost and also clearly don’t know what they don’t know.
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In Gates’s case (and probably others like him) it’s the unquestioning assumption that everyone else is like, or wants to be like him ie motivated only by personal profit and ego.
There are also some loaded philanthropists who make sizeable anonymous donations to good causes who by definition we don’t hear much about, but it’s hard to believe most don’t want their names emblazoned across a hospital wing.
We should seek to help these poor souls with the onerous responsibility that comes with enormous wealth by removing from them the burden of deciding how and how much to donate.
Seems like there’s already a model for how to effectively fund vaccines for the third world. Every vaccine someone in the first world pays for also pays for a vaccine or two in the third world.
I’m not sure about raw materials but india produces 80% of America’s pharmaceutical stuff and other vaccines. From what I’ve read these places have expressed that they have the ability to manufacture the vaccines they just need the procedure and patent lifted.
I don’t buy in that only these companies have the tech and skills. They just say that to protect their profits. Even if, BIG IF, they can easily train people.
I think raw material was a problem in the beginning but I don’t think it is anymore, I haven’t heard anything about us being close to peak production because of raw material shortage for months.
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Some dogshit headline work from the CBC here:
“Speaks out” had a lot of “scandal exposing” connotations. The actual article is vaguely supportive of AZ vax.
I still suspect that the mRNA process is different enough that it can be immediately scaled up in any a generic facility. The traditional vaccines (AZ/JJ) though should be readily scaled.
If I am India, I am just saying “Fuck you WTO, we are making the vaccine. Come after me. I will come after you for crimes against humanity.”
Also what’s up evil Canada!
Because these rules are so stringent and complex, only once in WTO history has a developing country lacking production capabilities forced an export license onto a patent-holding country. In 2007, Rwanda sought to import antiretroviral HIV medicines from Canada — and Ottawa granted the license more than a year after the initial request.
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Yeah I just saw a video of people dying outside the hospital in India and it was heartbreaking. Just absolutely disgusting were putting corporate profits over human lives in such an obvious matter
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Pretty much this. All this concern about Ip law is no sense. You could immediately create a narrowly defined temporary waiver that would work fine.
Since poor countries are getting 1% of all vaccines, we will only need to make 1 trillion. doses to vaccinate the world
I really don’t understand why these poorer countries are not clapping back with taking these countries to the Gagyd who hide behind the WTO
(I know why, rich countries bully and extort poorer countries into compliance)
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Those people just need to apply The Secret. If they put positive vibes out there, better things will come.
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The next Bill Gates AMA is gonna be like the one Wyclef Jean did.
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The new American Museum of Natural History site prioritizes public housing residents and cultural institution workers but is open to all city residents. It initially had been slated to open as an appointment-only site, but Health Commissioner Dr. Dave Chokshi said Friday that hub would move immediately to a walk-in site.
To sweeten the pot, people who go there can get free museum tickets, too.
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