if you want to make the argument that we have a moral duty to turn into the Vaccine Manufacturing Chain States Of America for the next year that sounds fucking GREAT to me, I would love that

"TankieFuckboy12389494 on Twitter told me that all Biden has to do is sign a piece of paper and billions of vaccines would be available to India and we're not doing that therefore Biden is doing a genocide!" is a less great argument

"My model of reality is suspiciously simple and has one bad guy responsible for everything bad, and it happens to be the person responsible for us not having another four years of Trump! I am very smart."

We can't distribute extant vaccines to other countries because Trump's administration - probably Stephen Miller, this reeks of him - made VERY sure to stipulate in our contracts that we couldn't and the Biden admin is /actively looking/ for ways to subvert those contracts...

w/o opening the US up to hilariously ruinous legal ramifications; this is clearly something the Trump admin did on purpose to hobble Biden and make him look bad and they are making exactly as much hay out of it as you'd expect, progressives are being useful idiots about it.

the actual bottleneck *isn't* the patents (and Moderna have EXPLICTLY said that they won't be enforcing patents on ANY part of the vaccine tech until long after the pandemic is over)

the bottleneck is that all extant vaccines can only be produced in highly specialised and frankly still experimental production chains that can't be easily replicated elsewhere and the attempt to scale up rapidly has led to a bunch of exciting logistical clusterfucks *already*

you can basically go and find the source code for the vaccine in 10 minutes but good fucking luck making it in billions-of-doses bulk! but this doesn't support the argument that Biden is the endboss of COVID and is personally doing a genocide so out the window IT goes

meanwhile the political will to actually do something like transfer medical equipment en masse is- well, luckily for humanity Biden's administration is ALREADY DOING THAT. There are things we CAN in fact be doing and things it is reasonable to look at and go "can this be faster?"

I guess I can imagine a world where everyone buzzing about this on Twitter gets people to write to their congresscritters demanding immediate and sweeping foreign aid to countries impacted hard by COVID right now. I guess if you take anything away from this thread... go do that?

Medical supplies, oxygen machines, it's an actual fucking global humanitarian crisis, the kind of thing the world SHOULD come together to fix; there is a gaping wound in the world right now and there are things actually within our power to do to repair it

instead, we're screaming about patents, because it's what lets us make this Joe Biden's fault somefuckinghow b/c we can't imagine a world more complex than "everything is one specific guy's fault" after 4 years of Trump.

one despairs.