Bill Gates says vaccine formulas shouldn't be shared with developing world | Hacker News Reader

Bill Gates says vaccine formulas shouldn't be shared with developing world

independent.co.uk

14 pointsgiis15 comments

It's an arrogant assumption on Gates' part. Let other countries worry about the safety and quality of locally-produced vaccines. Give them that choice. Monopolizing a cure to a threat to all of us and assuming other countries can't produce quality vaccines is paternalistic BS.

The developing countries are being asked to pay astronomical costs for the vaccines which need to be imported and due to the limited supply (since they are only manufactured in some places) there is not enough supply.

Some of the folks are suggesting that the Pharma companies license the technologies to local production plants, like how Oxford-AstraZeneca is being manufactured in India so that they can manufacture it at a cheaper cost and reduce the stress on the global supply chain that is frankly struggling to meet the demand.

More radical folks are suggesting that the IP should be made open to all since it was funded by Tax dollars/Euros/Yen/Rupees etc. In fact the original plan was for Oxford to make its vaccine open access but the Gates foundation convinced them to not do that. (https://khn.org/news/rather-than-give-away-its-covid-vaccine...)

Remember it's not like the Virus will respect the borders and decide not to spread to the 'developed' countries once it mutates and it will, it's just a matter of time.

- Suramya

Contrary to what the title implies, those vaccines aren't 'shared' with the developed world either. They're kept by the pharma companies, and the developed world has to pay for doses, despite having funded over 97% of the vaccine development cost with taxes [1,2]. Yet these articles are implicitly asking us to feel guilty for.. what? Allowing the patent cartel to bribe our politicians and extort us?

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/apr/15/oxfordastraz...

[2] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.04.08.21255103v...

Well, we _are_ living in democracies, aren't we ?

Empirically, no: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

The US was ostensibly a representative republic, not a democracy, but it's actually an oligarchy.

https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746

I forgot to add /sarcasm

Yet these articles are implicitly asking us to feel guilty for.. what?

Sorry to be obtuse, but what's the answer to this question? What should I feel guilty for?

That 'we', the developed world, aren't sharing vaccine formulas with the developing world. But that guilt trip only works if you accept that the private citizens of the developed world, and the pharmaceutical companies trying to wring every last dollar and euro out of us, are part of the same 'we', instead of two fundamentally opposed groups.

I wish journalists would stop writing articles about what random outraged people on Twitter are projecting today.

Here's a better article: Take this comment Gates made and interview three experts from adjacent and relevant disciplines that know what they're talking about to see if what Gates is saying is true.

Low brow journalism.

Not disagreeing but I feel like calling this "low brow" journalism lowers the bar. We're better off not calling these people "journalists" at all. Part of being a journalist is about having journalistic integrity - its easy enough to just write an article but that doesn't mean a journalist was involved.

> We're better off not calling these people "journalists" at all.

Deliberately go no-true-Scotsman?

Cory Doctorow has a great take on this: https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/27/bruno-argento/#pharma-dea... that I thought people here would find useful.

can vaccine be open sourced?

I think the only question is

Do we want to commit mass suicide or not?

If so, it's really easy -- just don't share the vaccines with the world.

The viruses will mutate and come back and kill us all soon enough. It's already started.

A metaphore would be global warming

We solve it for the entire planet, or we all die.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I doubt it.

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