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Comment by throwaway4good | Hacker News Reader

Something here smells deeply hypocritical.

Currently vaccine companies such as the German Curevac (which is the vaccine company Trump famously tried to buy) is being held back by lack of core ingredients which are under American export bans.

The US still upholds the export bans setup by the Trump administration. Biden can just revoke those. Yet he promotes the idea of waivering vaccine patents knowing well how hard that would be to do in practice.

And exactly how is it supposed to work? Will Pfizer no longer have to pay license fees to BioNTech?

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The US put an export ban on basically everything regarding vaccines, very early on. If you look at the amount of vaccines produced, the US and EU are fairly close to each other.

The difference in Vaccine rollout comes from the fact that the EU exports vaccines to other countries while the US does not.

As a European I would've been in favour of more export controls, but a total ban seems to go too far. Why should 18 years olds in the EU/US receive a vaccine before 75 year olds in other countries?

Then again, the EU exported to countries that are now further ahead than the EU itself, which seems the other extreme end.

> Why should 18 years olds in the EU/US receive a vaccine before 75 year olds in other countries?

I don’t know what the EU governments kicked in, but the US basically threw tens of billions of dollars at the US pharma giants to bankroll the wide-scale rollout of not one but three vaccines. The patents are largely European, but the rapid scale-up of production was only possible because of US contributions (true on both sides of the ocean as the US paid to build factories in Europe too in exchange for priority access).

But on a larger scale, individual outcomes are somewhat meaningless in the scope of government. Each country’s government has a duty to protect the public health of its citizens, which means trying to get to herd immunity within its own population. It’s like putting on your own mask before helping someone else.

The EU approached the vaccine production with hopeless naivete while the UK and US approached it like they were at war.

Biden speaks in a nicer manner but he is still doing the policies of Trump's America First.

IMHO we in Europe should return the favour and start working with the Chinese on vaccine production. They are the only ones with an industrial capacity comparable to the US.

The US and UK approach it as if they are at war with everyone else. It is very sad to see where their priorities really are when this is a global issue not separated by borders.

The resulting chip shortage and the state which India is in will also affect the US and UK even if they don't think it will.

The West has a deep obligation to end the pandemic globally, but it also has every right to end the pandemic at home first. Israel, the US, and the UK are acting like they're at war against the pandemic, and finally, they're winning.

But other countries have acted as though there was an infectious disease outbreak, haven't had the deaths and don't need to "win" because they didn't "loose" in the first place.

Yes, China was very successful at containing the outbreak by welding the ill into their apartment buildings. Australia and New Zealand had the benefit of their rather extreme isolation from the rest of the world. India looked like it was doing great til it wasn't.

> Why should 18 years olds in the EU/US receive a vaccine before 75 year olds in other countries?

Because a nation state has a duty to protect the safety of its own citizens first and foremost. If a government continuously puts the needs of other countries over the needs of its own citizens, who is going to support a system like that long-term? Perhaps a handful of upper-middle-class idealists, but not most people. Right or wrong, that's just not human nature.

> Because a nation state has a duty to protect the safety of its own citizens first and foremost.

I strongly agree, but that does not mean it has to be completely amoral in its interactions with other nations. Its own citizens may in fact be in favor of taking on some risk to help people beyond their borders.

There is also a pragmatic side to this. A nation that acts too selfishly may soon find itself without allies.

Perhaps I didn't put enough nuance in my response, you're absolutely right. A nation state should put it's citizens first, but that should not preclude helping others.

| If you look at the amount of vaccines produced, the US and EU are fairly close to each other.

EU has 2x the number of people.

The EU has 448 million people, the US has 332 million. So nowhere close to 2x.

> As a European I would've been in favour of more export controls, but a total ban seems to go too far. Why should 18 years olds in the EU/US receive a vaccine before 75 year olds in other countries?

I don’t know if my intuition is correct, but reigning in COVID’s R₀ worldwide at once seems like a moonshot in current state of civilization (keeping in mind its mutations and all).

Meanwhile, for better or for worse, the planet isn’t a single community: given border controls that can serve as a barrier to virus spread, it might just be more realistic to get things under control in smaller disconnected populations, which can then “bubble up”, restore quality of life and allow freedom of movement between themselves while at the same time helping bring other parts of the world back up to speed.

And yes, this does smell of the trolley problem and I wouldn’t want to be the person who would have to make such a decision.

Yeah, and if Trump was still in power I have zero doubt the media would call him out on what a cynical stunt this is - but Biden is in charge now, and that makes a huge difference to how they report on everything.

Well, Trumps actions would have been self-serving and cynical (as they all were). Biden hasn't shown those 'qualities'. Which is why I (and the WHO) give him the benefit of the doubt in this case.

But somehow some random "throwaway" account on a forum has more info than all of Biden's advisers? "Benefit of the doubt" is just a cover. We must assume competence and intent on the administration's part and hold them accountable for it (or give them credit), otherwise we're letting our bias/favoritism show through.

Let's be fair. We all gave Trump the benefit of the doubt. It was only after years of broken promises, and angry outbursts that some people turned against him by default.

Give Biden at least 1 year, and you'll see that some people are reflexively critical of him too.

Centrist voters may have given him some benefit of the doubt, but the news media never did and were never going to. Conservatives knew that ahead of time, which is why they voted for someone prone to angry outbursts.

Biden isn't exactly an outsider, and is just the face for scores of actual decision-makers in his administration; I don't think one more year is going to surprise anybody.

The news media is largely conservative. Over 50% of people in the US watch Fox news.

Now, granted, Murdoch wasn't always in favor of Trump, he still fell into line after the guy got elected.

> We all gave Trump the benefit of the doubt.

Seriously? Nothing of the sort happened. There was constant negative media and calls for impeachment immediately.

Let me remind you, in case you forgot, that the Muslim ban EO happened 7 days into Trump's tenure (as well as shithole countries remark). That's about all the "chance" I was prepared to give.

If that's how you lead foreign policy 7 days in, you don't deserve to be president. Full stop.

By "Muslim ban" you mean the travel restrictions of on citizens of the seven countries that Barak Obama also had restrictions on? It wasn't a muslim ban as nowhere in the language or practice did it ban muslims form entering the US. It restricted entry from people from seven countries that were listed by the Obama administration as having high rates of terrorist links. Hillary Clinton would likely have taken the same step if she had become president.

you realize under Trump, it was a blanket ban on all entry? that definitely wasn't the case under Obama.

It must sting that the (arguably) only successful thing to come out of this America First policy is now being credited to the Biden administration.

For all the mess Biden has inherited, he also inherited a near perfect vaccine production program. The reversals issued in the first 100 days did not reverse any export bans or regulations the Trump admin put in place for the vaccine production and rollout.

The vaccine program was failing to rollout when Biden inherited it.

The vaccines first got approval in December 2020, it wasn't failing it was just starting up. European vaccine rollout also had starting aches but was then very quickly limited by the supply-side.

Fair point. As we've seen there is due process and concerns as seen with some vaccines.

> The vaccine program was failing to rollout when Biden inherited it.

Regardless of what you think of Joe Biden or Donald Trump, this statement is categorically false.

There are enough legitimate things to criticize Donald Trump for that we don't need to make things up. As others have pointed out, the vaccine program was just starting up at the end of the Trump administration. Besides, much of the actual logistics were, and are, handled at the state level.

Why is that do you think?

To revert self-serving orders, require extraordinary political clout above and beyond. Can that be done regarding every "bad" decision? A competent administration must not undo the "good" decisions as well.

I think it's ridiculous to say "they, the media" here when media in the US is so often blatantly partisan. I don't believe it's difficult to find media that calls out Biden.

No, it is not. He is too centrist for left media. And right media hate him.

Please stop with this false narrative. American conservatives have giant and pervasive media organizations that cover Biden negatively 24/7. You're selectively choosing which "media" to criticize.

"Conservative media" (AM radio, Fox mostly, and various periodicals) are still treated as an alternative to "media", by all sides.

Fox news is the only "giant" media corporation promoting the conservative side and there are several individuals there that praise Biden. Everything else is left to far left, including our education system and the largest corporations in this country.

So, take your own advice and stop promoting this false narrative that there's negative Biden coverage anywhere near the amount that Trump had. It's absolutely obvious that's not true.

Let us not forget the climate that Trump created for himself. Much of that constant negative coverage was more about his antics and absurdities, and at some point, it became impossible for him to do/say much of anything without completely deserved backlash.

With that said, I can’t claim there is no media bias re: Biden, but we should not pretend that the circumstances are even close to similar.

That only happened because conservatives gave up trying to please a hostile audience. Reagan was Satan incarnate, until 20 years later, when he was a voice of reason compared to Dubya. Rinse and repeat.

Nobody cares about your conservative victomhood complex. If your leaders aren't mature enough to do their job without throwing a temper tantrum whenever someone says something mean about them, then sit the fuck down and let the adults handle it.

Yes but the media was biased before Trump, it just became glaringly obvious during his administration because they were profiting off of his antics. Their viewership has plummeted post Trump and you can see them grasping at anything to sensationalize and garner more views.

This reminds of the old quip about the founding of Fox News. Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch claimed they had found an untapped niche market in American broadcasting, "Half the country".

"left" ><

Ah now, the OP definitely has a point.

When Trump didn't condemn Saudi Arabia it was the worst thing any US president had done, when Biden does the same it's crickets.

Like, I hated Trump and I'm pretty happy with Biden, but to say that there isn't a substantial difference in media coverage is really just not true.

I never see your conservative media in any of my feeds unless I specifically go out and look for it. To us Europeans it looks like you Americans blindly approve of everything Biden does because that is the news you choose to show us.

I don't think it is healthy that you need to go to the other sides newspapers in order to get a proper evaluation of what Biden does, why should I have to dig through fox news to understand the narrative?

The persecution complex...

What difference? Were they calling those bans a stunt before? No. You don't need to be hypothetical. This policy wasn't a secret.

The media didn't have to dig this deep when drinking bleach and injecting light were the topics du jour.

I believe this is exactly the reason why the US promotes it and Germany opposes it. It's mainly a discussion about whether Pfizer (US) has to pay licensing fees to Biontech (DE).

Yes, it seems pointless if there’s no generics being made, but I would be very concerned about assuming a generic of a vaccine is the same. We already have enough vaccine hesitancy, adding in extra variables doesn’t seem great.

Is there anywhere I can read more about this? In the grand scheme of American healthcare costs I don’t think the ~$20 Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine is where we should suddenly try to cut costs by stiffing the scientists who did all the hard work over a decade to make it happen. I’m assuming the current $20 price tag already includes BioNTech’s fees?

>Currently vaccine companies such as the German Curevac (which is the vaccine company Trump famously tried to buy) is being held back by lack of core ingredients which are under American export bans.

Do you know specifically which materials?

I had the exact same question. What I could find was this Reuters article [0] which lists nucleotides and special plastic containers as two of the items in short supply.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...

Opening up the IP is a 'win' for almost everyone but the companies making vaccines, so there's not much downside.

Exporting individual vaccines might break contracts, and because it's a little bit zero-sum, the public at large may hold him in contempt for not putting 'America first'.

Biden would 100% be against it if it was an American company that held the patents. He'd say that we shouldn't throw the company that worked so hard to provide us with a vaccine under the buss just to save money.

Removing the patent doesn't save more people, just as many vaccines would get produced, it just shifts money from the company to the state that pays for the vaccine.

I share your cynicism, but it actually will change the vaccine equation.

Money and risk is a very material part of the equation, now that the dynamics have changed, a lot more speculative money will be available. Supply and Demand works on cash just as it does for other things.

Also I don't think it has a populist aspect.

Exporting 'already made vaccines' does have a populist risk - a lot of Americans may 'get really mad!' if the US is seen to be exporting vaccines to other places before the US is fully vaccinated, irrespective of whether their chagrin is misplaced or not, the news cycle populism may have a field day with that. And there's the contractual stuff which he cannot 'waive'.

USA has the means to produce a lot of it, Europe had the means to develop it. Doesn't make sense that USA gets to enjoy all the benefits of producing without giving Europe any credit for developing it. Why should EU share its research with USA in the future if USA doesn't want to reciprocate?

So first, Supply and Demand is not just about 'means', it's about process, risk etc.. Removing a major barrier increases potential.

Second, it's a lot to do with the 'rest of the world' not really the US.

Third, AZ was UK not Europe, J&J was Neterhlands but owned by an American firm, Pfizer/BioNTech was both, Moderna was USA. So I don't see how this is a 'Europe victim' scenario.

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