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Last week, @ambassadortai, Biden's US Trade Rep, made history by announcing that the US would support petitions from countries in the Global South for a patent waiver on covid vaccines, which would broaden the world's capacity to produce vaccines.
https://twitter.com/AmbassadorTai/status/1390021205974003720
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https://twitter.com/AmbassadorTai/status/1390021205974003720
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That's a very important priority. The world's 125 poorest countries have received zero doses, and 85 countries with a population of 2.5b project that they won't be fully vaccinated until 2023 or 24.
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Not only will this delay sicken and kill millions of people, it will also incubate new variants, some of which may be able to bypass vaccine-based defenses in the rest of the world.
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Cue foolish objections that viruses evolve towards less virulence lest they cause their own extinction. That's not how evolution works. Viruses don't know if a mutation will cause them to eliminate their host organisms and thus commit suicide.
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The mechanism that selects against driving a host to extinction is...driving a host to extinction. Yes, that'll certainly show covid who's boss, but it comes at a pretty high cost to host organisms like (checks notes) us.
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We need more vaccines, for our own sakes and for the sakes of billions of people in the global south. That much is obvious, but Big Pharma and its allies have consistently briefed against any relaxation of patent restrictions on vaccines.
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Despite the vast, long-run public subsidies and the emergency billions the public provided for covid vaccine development, pharma bros have insisted that the only duty they owe to the public is to preserve the profit motive so that future pharma bros will follow their lead.
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Pharma monopolists have powerful allies. Bill Gates used his elite philanthropy to kill the Oxford team's plan to make its work publicly available. Instead, they've exclusively licensed it to Astrazeneca.
https://khn.org/news/rather-than-give-away-its-covid-vaccine-oxford-makes-a-deal-with-drugmaker/
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https://khn.org/news/rather-than-give-away-its-covid-vaccine-oxford-makes-a-deal-with-drugmaker/
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Hundreds of lobbyists have descended on DC to fight any patent waiver:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/27/bruno-argento/#pharma-death-cult
Including former progressive Howard Dean, who now pushes the racist lie that poor brown people are too primitive to make vaccines:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/08/howard-dino/#the-scream
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https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/27/bruno-argento/#pharma-death-cult
Including former progressive Howard Dean, who now pushes the racist lie that poor brown people are too primitive to make vaccines:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/08/howard-dino/#the-scream
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But mRNA vaccines are surprising easy and cheap to make. You can see that in the work of independent experts:
https://coronavirus.medium.com/manufacturing-mrna-vaccines-is-surprisingly-straightforward-despite-what-bill-gates-thinks-222cffb686ee
But don't take their word for it! Moderna itself says you can scratch-build a production facility in three months:
https://apnews.com/article/drug-companies-called-share-vaccine-info-22d92afbc3ea9ed519be007f8887bcf6
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https://coronavirus.medium.com/manufacturing-mrna-vaccines-is-surprisingly-straightforward-despite-what-bill-gates-thinks-222cffb686ee
But don't take their word for it! Moderna itself says you can scratch-build a production facility in three months:
https://apnews.com/article/drug-companies-called-share-vaccine-info-22d92afbc3ea9ed519be007f8887bcf6
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It's hard to understand how the pharma industry could brief against expanding production of vaccines for the 2.5b poorest people.
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Sure, maintaining control means that elite philanthropists and rich governments will eventually pay pharma for the doses they ship to poor countries in 2023/4, but that money comes with a substantial business risk - e.g., vaccine-resistant, civilization-endangering strains.
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In his newsletter, @matthewstoller describes pharma's upside: that sub-existential new strains will emerge that fuel the market for annual covid boosters, which pharma CEOs have promised to sell at $175/dose, instead of the $12.50 "pandemic price."
https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/why-joe-biden-punched-big-pharma
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https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/why-joe-biden-punched-big-pharma
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This doesn't mean they're deliberately trying to keep the virus alive so they can sell boosters - rather, it's a cost-benefit analysis that factors in the possible upside of new strains, weighed against the downside of civilizational collapse, and rolls the dice anyway.
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This kind of depraved indifference to civilizational risks is par for the course with pharma and ideologues like Gates, who has used his philanthropic work as a tool to destroy public institutions from education to health.
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That's a program that Biden has long supported from the senate and in the vice-presidency, so it's small wonder that skeptics are closely reading the statement of support and pointing out potential ways to weasel out of it:
https://www.dailyposter.com/vaccine-waiver-pledge-tests-biden-worlds-pharma-ties/
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https://www.dailyposter.com/vaccine-waiver-pledge-tests-biden-worlds-pharma-ties/
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But I'm not as skeptical as they are - not because of any prior faith in Biden, but because of my long experience with the USTR in global IP forums, including my stint at WIPO as an NGO observer to several treaties.
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As Stoller points out, this is a nigh-miraculous shift in the USTR's position, absolutely without precedent: "USTR was always the center of corporate power in government. For USTR to go against pharma is truly the world turned upside down."
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Pharma is spitting nails over it, lobbying hard in the EU (where the pretense of governmental indepedence from corporate lobbyists is routinely revealed as the same sham as the US version) and trying to scuttle any action.
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Meanwhile, Gates and his Foundation have done their own about-face:
https://www.geekwire.com/2021/gates-foundation-reverses-position-covid-vaccine-patent-protections-mounting-pressure/
which represents as seismic a shift as the USTR's own reversal:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/public-interest-pharma/#gates-foundation
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https://www.geekwire.com/2021/gates-foundation-reverses-position-covid-vaccine-patent-protections-mounting-pressure/
which represents as seismic a shift as the USTR's own reversal:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/public-interest-pharma/#gates-foundation
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It's really hard to overstate how huge this is. As Stoller writes, "Biden just showed that big pharma, one of the most powerful forces in American and global politics, is not untouchable."
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