Oxford pledged to donate rights to their Covid Vaccine, then sold them to pharma
khn.org
khn.org
Also just assuming that someone who donates billions is evil without any research whatsoever is just lazy clickbait journalism.
Next it talks about how businesses profit from this. While true it's also totally misses the point. The economist wrote an article on how the world is vastly underspending on solving this problem.
Another one: "this should have expected better negotiation on the part of the U.S. government". If I'm negotiating with a freelance developer and need help tomorrow, do you think it makes sense to haggle on price? I definitely wouldn't.
Is it supposed to make me feel better that not only are we not spending enough on the problem, but what little we are spending is going to line the pockets of Big Pharma instead?
It’s amazing to me that we now have a generation coming up that doesn’t know that we—-that is the human race—-tried socialism, really gave it the old college try, and it. did. not. work. For a significant period of time most of the educated people in the world thought it would work. This was not some fringe idea that was never given a fair shot.
(I’m talking here about actual socialism, not welfare capitalism that many on the contemporary left and right call socialism for their own propagandist reasons.)
If you want I'll critique the rest.
Advocating for central planning in 2021 is like advocating for NoSQL—-lots of pretty arguments vs the overwhelming weight of real world evidence.
We are paying off the ransomers we outfitted.
Maybe it's unavoidable this time, but I would sure like to see the system reformed to not get in the bind again.
Finally, taking a step back, US/EU complete reliance on a vaccine is also preventable. See East Asia, where the non-abysmal quarantine would allow a less desperate negotiation with the drug lords.
I'm confused about why you left your first assertion in place since you went on to acknowledge it wasn't factual.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-eu-ast...
It's important to hold "free market" solutions accountable when they fail to deliver. Maybe all these decisions were really made in a good faith belief that selling to AZ was for the best. But the proof is in the tasting; intentions are important but they don't change reality.
This is not a tertium non datur situation.
If donating money is ‘neutral’ then not donating money is ‘neutral’.
I’m not joining the discussion on whether or not this is a charitable act, just pointing out (since this is HN) inconsistencies.
Assuming someone who donates billions is not evil is also lazy thinking...
To me the article doesn't say Gates is "evil". They say Gates uses his immense influence to make the world how he sees fit.
Do you have any evidence against Gate's being in strong favor of IP over open access?
And let's roll with it... Do you think Gates should have the power to influence the lives of billions like that? I don't mean "access to vaccines" and other superficial no-brainers, I mean setting up the world way beyond the good bits. It's not like the "patents: good, corporate power: good" weltanschauung is general consensus, especially in research where he plays his cards[+].
[1] https://www.gatesfoundation.org/How-We-Work/General-Informat...
Thanks, tho. Kinda ironic.
Yes, I think the world will be worse-off if he couldn't. I definitely wouldn't put all my hope in governments and is overall good that there are other actors, too.
I can recommend this Scott Alexander piece on the topic[0].
0. https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/29/against-against-billio...
Shall we talk incentives? If billionaries cannot launder their reputations through philanthropy, maybe that would be more careful of their reputation during the wealth-accumulation phase.
This reasoning is the equivalent of "well, the sharecropper better keep on paying the man, because no field means starvation which is worse".
Heck, he has probably got many more people who dislike him now because of the global health work, due to the antivax people and the conspiracy theorists. See this petition last year at whitehouse.gov that wants the Gates Foundation investigated for crimes against humanity, and got almost 700k signatures.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20201223180912/https://petitions...
I think you are exaggerating the effect of it. Do you really those who do shady deals think about 'laundering their reputation' when they are older - especially with the majority of their assets - as a big reason to do what they do, to the point where they wouldn't do those deals if they cant do philanthropy later? Perhaps to a small extent but I seriously doubt it's a big part of the picture. Definitely not enough to overshadow all the good done through philanthropy.
Don't assume society is ergodic in what has been a period of rapid technological change.
> Definitely not enough to overshadow all the good done through philanthropy.
What are the greatest hits beyond mosquito nets?
At least in the current era, the "undeveloped" country is a bit of a rarity, and the main malaise is rampant Anocracy where institutions are weak, and social coordination of any sort is weak outside that which stems from the private fortunes of the elite.
How could private fortunes in developed countries tackle a problem like that?
And frankly, even before that, the absolute material standard of living is not necessary the best utility function. Hierarchy of needs means yes got to do the basics first, but it also means that people don't know what they aren't missing and relative distribution and other less obvious things may be more important for happiness and societal function.
If I were billionaire, I would throw all my money into improving democracy (and creatively, if it's easier to allow people to emigrate from US to better democracy than fix US, work on the former.) That the US government is exceptionally shitty makes for a too-easy straw-man when defending philanthropy against democracy.
Don't you think these changes to the structure of society and culture should be subject to democratic oversight?
Did people vote with their wallets and agreed to this, when they bought a PC in the 90s?
There's still some oversight, he can't literally do quite anything he wishes. At any rate, from looking at the performance of those with democratic oversight (governments), I think having both is overall better than just one. Sometimes governments are much too slow and waste hundreds of times more to achieve less, while in practice being plagued by similar concerns (what if the wrong government official uses the money in a bad way?).
He can. Just not directly. That's why I linked the million vs billion illustration. He has such a huge amount of life changing money, he simply can buy his influence and manifest his will. Here an American billionaire influences a British research institution to make a decision according to his worldview, a decision in existential crisis to humanity.
If you align with his worldview, you may like the result, but I really can't understand how you can be willingly ignorant about the dynamics at hand and how much power these billionaires have over everyone's life. Much more, Gates didn't become rich for making the better product, but for clever business strategies and ruthless monopolizing a market for the longest time. His success is exactly failure of the free market naiveté.
Nobody should be that rich. (And yes, no single government official should be trusted with deciding how to spend tax money either. Everything needs to be transparent and actionable to the voted policies.)
I doubt that Oxford would have changed their position if Larry Ellison had called to suggest it.
Gates suggesting it gets taken seriously not because he has a lot of money, but because he's spent the last couple of decades heavily involved in global health, much of that concentrating on less developed countries and on vaccination (which fits right in with what Oxford wants for their vaccine), and has developed a good reputation for knowing the field.
Which is only possible, because he has a lot of money. That's fallacious reasoning.
> “[Bill] Gates has staked out this outsized role in the vaccine world,” Love said. “He has an ideological belief that the intellectual property system is a wonderful mechanism that is necessary for innovation and prosperity.”
Ideological belief.
Many people have a different take on this, but they tend to not get the power in a capitalistic system, so you won't get the possible alternative story told. Gate's success is a self-fulfilling prophecy and hardly evidence to justify the means.
My point is he is shaping the world to his liking, his ideology. No single human should have that power.
The article posted here purposefully omits the cost price of the Oxford vaccine which is approximately £3 ($5). Even if AstraZeneca were to add a profit margin of a few dollars to the cost price (e.g. bring the cost to $10) that would still be cheaper than the vaccines from Biotech/Pfizer and Moderna.
Also, Oxford has always insited that they wanted to create a vaccine that would be as cheap as possible to manufacture so it would be affordable to treat people around the world.
Also, there is COVAX which already purchased nearly 3 billion doses for poorer countries[1].
So until you can show me that this partnership caused direct harm to people, and that the risk of this taking more time than it has is small, I call BS.
[1] https://www.unicef.org/supply/covid-19-vaccine-market-dashbo...
Teaming up with a large drug company was the fastest way to determine if the drug was safe, effective and get it manufactured.
> “[Bill] Gates has staked out this outsized role in the vaccine world,” Love said. “He has an ideological belief that the intellectual property system is a wonderful mechanism that is necessary for innovation and prosperity.”
/Zizek
The incentive is in the form of cash money from governments. Nobody is asserting the Pharma companies should build and run a manufacturing pipeline for free.
Ultimately society should be dependent on taxation not philanthropy. One is guaranteed.
www.wsj.com/amp/articles/oxford-developed-covid-vaccine-then-scholars-clashed-over-money-11603300412
>One longtime Oxford donor, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, was assisting with Covid-19 efforts globally. In March, Prof. Bell says Trevor Mundel, head of the foundation’s global-health program, told him, “You guys need a partner.”
>Prof. Bell says he told Profs. Gilbert and Hill that they had a conflict of interest in any talks between Oxford and potential partners, because of their ownership stake in Vaccitech.
> Prof. Bell also didn’t want Vaccitech at the negotiating table, and considered it inconceivable that the company, with just a few dozen staff, could help coordinate a global vaccine rollout.
> After 10 days of talks, AstraZeneca agreed to commit to global distribution that wouldn’t favor any one country or region. It also agreed to provide the vaccine at cost during the pandemic, or at least until next summer, pending terms they were still hashing out. U.K. government officials worked on a deal to pay up-front for doses.
> Details of Oxford’s agreement with AstraZeneca are private. But a company spokesman said it guarantees to sell at no profit the roughly 3 billion doses for which it already has agreements in place.
>The big drugmaker offered a sweetener: It said that as long as Vaccitech signed over its Covid-19 vaccine rights to Oxford to enable an exclusive license, AstraZeneca in turn promised to explore ways to collaborate with the small biotech firm, according to an agreement signed by Dr. Pangalos. The nonbinding agreement cited “AstraZeneca’s potential participation in Vaccitech’s proposed Series B financing.”
> “The university didn’t enter this discussion with the idea of making a ton of money,” Prof. Bell says. But it didn’t want to be naïve, either: “Let’s say [the vaccine] becomes a seasonal coronavirus vaccine, and it sells a billion dollars a year. For us to be sitting there and making no money looks pretty dumb.”
As I understand it, the theory is that such a company will be able to commercially exploit research in a way a university couldn't. But if in practice commercially exploiting research means selling the rights to a global firm like AstraZeneca, it seems to me that nothing was gained.
They're genuinely set up as largely independent entities, with the researchers supposed to be making commercial decisions.
This is clearly not some quick profit grab, and there are likely good reasons behind it, some of which are hinted at.
0. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/18/belgian-minist...
- Squashed support for COVID-19 human challenge trials[0], claiming it was “too risky” while standing to profit enormously from their own brand-new MRNA vaccines
- Did less than nothing to promote general immune health, spread awareness of ubiquitous seasonal Vitamin D deficiency at high latitudes, etc
- Just got a back-scratch from the new administration, which canceled an order to increase price transparency for insulin and EpiPens
The system is completely broken, from top to bottom.
[0] https://www.statnews.com/2020/06/23/challenge-trials-live-co...
Is this the pharma industries job?
www.wsj.com/amp/articles/oxford-developed-covid-vaccine-then-scholars-clashed-over-money-11603300412
> Oxford backed off from its open-license pledge after the Gates Foundation urged it to find a big-company partner to get its vaccine to market.
> “We went to Oxford and said, Hey, you’re doing brilliant work,” Bill Gates told reporters on June 3, a transcript shows. “But … you really need to team up.” The comments were first reported by Bloomberg.
AstraZeneca may not have been a good choice either in the end. They're falling way behind their targets and are causing vaccine shortages right now.
https://www.brusselstimes.com/news/belgium-all-news/150975/b...
It's like the opposite of VC.
Can anyone explain such logic and why it's still in place?
So government, which represents the public good invest the money so this will happen.
But free market fanatics like gates cannot allow any solution which "does not compute" from that (your) perspective.
Without government funding to spur research quickly then fewer companies would risk it and those that did find an effective vaccine would sell them for whatever the market would pay - which is a lot more than what they are going for now. By funding the research the governments at least have a claim of hoarding the vaccine rather than letting market participants bid on it. And this would mean millions of not-rich people wouldn’t get it for a long time. At least now it’s based on need and not ability to pay to protect your life and is actually available.