Remember Howard Dean, the progressive champion who campaigned on equitable health care and other desperately needed policies?

He& #39;s dead.

He& #39;s been replaced by Howard Dean, the not-a-lobbyist who won& #39;t tell anyone what he does for the giant lobbying firm Dentons.

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The old Howard Dean supported single-payer healthcare. The new Dean opposes it.

But then, that new Dean works for Dentons, the largest law firm in the world, alongside Newt Gingrich, as a "senior advisor" to the firm& #39;s lobbying arm.

https://theintercept.com/2016/01/14/howard-dean-lobbyist/

2/">https://theintercept.com/2016/01/1...
Dentons lobbies for pretty unsavory characters, including Big Health. Dentons owes its world-beating scale to a 2015 merger with the massive Chinese law-firm Dacheng.

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The arguments Dean fields for this are tired, racist, and manifestly untrue arguments, straight out of Big Pharma& #39;s playbook:

I. Poor countries can& #39;t make vaccines (reality: poor countries are already among the world& #39;s largest pharmaceutical manufacturers) and;

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II. No one will invest in pharma if poor people don& #39;t have to pay extortionate royalties in exchange for their lives (reality: pharma doesn& #39;t invest in pharma! The pharmaceutical industry is entirely and totally dependent on public R&D spending).

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Dean insists he& #39;s not a lobbyist, but he sure acts like one, trading on his reputation as a "liberal lion" to sell policies to benefit pharma at the expense of the public - like his work with BIO to secure exclusivity for breast-cancer treatments.

https://theintercept.com/2016/01/21/howard-dean-despite-denials-has-long-sad-history-of-selling-himself-on-k-street/

8/">https://theintercept.com/2016/01/2...
This would all be appalling on its own terms - a medical doctor who convinced progressives (including me) to volunteer for his presidential bid, selling out to corporate health-care profiteers, but when it comes to vaccines, this goes beyond selling out. It& #39;s genocidal.

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The racist lie that brown people can& #39;t manufacture their own vaccines is being peddled to maximize profits for some of the cruellest, most profitable, most publicly subsidized companies on Earth - and it& #39;s not merely unfair, it& #39;s an existential threat to human civilization.

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As Thrasher writes, today, borders are being used to decide who can get a vaccine. Tomorrow, vaccine passports would punish those unvaccinated people by denying them the right to cross borders. #VaccineEquity is the only just vaccine passport.

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"It is morally reprehensible (not to mention epidemiologically self-defeating) that countries can prevent vaccines from crossing their borders and want their own citizens to be able to cross those borders and travel to countries that are denied vaccines.

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"And then use the threat of infection to keep the people of those unvaccinated countries inside them...A vaccine passport conflates the notions of biology, nationalism and surveillance; it builds on and passively accepts the ethics of passport privilege in general."

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"This is especially true if you are traveling to or from a place where you know others do not have access to vaccines—and you want a special piece of paper proving that you do, which would allow you to cross the border."

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This is the kind of thing you& #39;d expect Dr Howard Dean, the progressive lion who championed single-payer and curbs on drug prices, to write. But he& #39;s not. Instead, he& #39;s peddling racism and profiteering to serve his corporate paymasters.

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RIP, Dr Dean. You sold your legacy - and our future - for a mess of potage.

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