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Let me start this li’l rant as I’ll end it: I love the vaccine! I’m so happy and grateful for it! This isn’t gonna be some anti-vaxx screed. (It’s gonna be an anti-IP screed.)
I expected that developing a COVID-19 vaccine in just a year or so would be a miracle, an eighth wonder of the world.
Thankfully, there were many routes attempted to get to that success. Every major pharma corp bet on its own horse. And here we are now, with twelve vaccines accross through four disparate vectors.
They all have their own pros and cons.
Some have more cons than others.
I’m not talking about side effects or risk. Just plain basic functionality such as “actually works, even on the SA mutation”.
Somewhere along the line, the expectation shifted from “it’ll be a miracle if even one of these vaccines work” to “every vaccine brand deserves its own day in the sun”.
It’s so messed up that some stuffy pre-Gutenberg-era business model based on “intellectual” “property” is the only thing standing between the world now pooling their recipes and concentrate on manufacturing the best kinds of vaccines. Sure, I get that there are more than one “best”; some were first on the scene, others don’t require constant cold storage etc. But there probably aren’t twelve “all our special children are best in their own way”–level vaccines.
I don’t know how medicine research works. I don’t. It just doesn’t intuitively make sense to to me that the world had to invent twelve separate wheels.
Yes, I’m definitively staring angrily at one particular brand right now that the local auths bet the proverbial farm on, but, this post will probably age horribly if I name it and it turns out to be the actual best after all, that all that particular megacorp’s shenanigans was just having a bad dream, really she’s okay. Because I’m not a pharmacist, I basically don’t know the difference between a medical cabinet and a frisbee.
What I do know is “licencing” and “intellectual” “property”. As in I know all that I need to know about it. Which is that it’s dumb and bad. The end. Thanks for reading.
Again: go get the shot. Please. Once you can, I mean, which, for us here, will hopefully happen. Eventually.
This post isn’t to discourage any one civilian from getting properly vaxxed up. It is a rant at goverments and NGOs that they should’ve sobered up and focused on the good vaccines instead of every subcontracted dog its due 15 minutes of fame.
Seems like I got half of what I wanted with EU not renewing orders of some of the less good vaccines.♥ We still live under the tyranny of IP, though.💔
https://oi-files-d8-prod.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/2022-03/Pandemic%20of%20greed-Oxfam%20media%20briefing-March2022.pdf
A proposal to ensure vaccine equity was tabled in October 2020 by India and South Africa at the World Trade Organisation (WTO). Their proposal was to waive patents and certain other in- tellectual property protections associated with vaccines, treatments, and tests and other COVID-19 technologies so that countries could manufacture or obtain access to lower-cost life- saving medical tools.
The EU nations and the UK are among the few countries who are blocking the intellectual prop- erty waiver proposal from moving forward.
TRIPs continues its tyranny of artifical scarcity. Patents are like trying to get tall by chopping off everyone else’s feet.