Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

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Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

Post by blindpig » Wed Mar 31, 2021 12:11 pm

WHO: Animal-to-human virus transmission most likely
By CHEN WEIHUA in Brussels | CHINA DAILY | Updated: 2021-03-31 07:13

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Peter Ben Embarek, WHO International Team Lead of the WHO-convened Global Study of the Origins of COVID-19 attends a news conference in Geneva, Switzerland, in this Feb 12, 2021 file photo. [Photo/Agencies]

The virus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic is "extremely unlikely" to have originated in a lab, but most likely jumped from an animal to humans, according to a World Health Organization report released on Tuesday by a joint international and Chinese team probing the virus' origins.

The 120-page report said the virus most probably jumped from an animal, potentially a bat or pangolin, to an unknown intermediate animal host and then to humans. However, the path of transmission is still not known.

"There is no record of viruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2 in any laboratory before December 2019, or genomes that in combination could provide a SARS-CoV-2 genome," the report said.

"In view of the above, a laboratory origin of the pandemic was considered to be extremely unlikely."

The report said that the two most likely scenarios to explain the emergence of COVID-19 both involve the transmission of the virus from animals to humans.

"So far, we have not been able to document any substantial transmission of SARS coronavirus in the months preceding the outbreak in December," Thea Fisher, a member of the international team, said at a news conference on the report on Tuesday.

Peter Ben Embarek, a Danish food safety and animal disease scientist who heads the international team, said the joint team looked into all scenarios.

"We try to stay with the arguments we have, the hard facts we have," he said.

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A diagram from the report by the WHO-China joint study team shows the possible transmission routes of SARS-CoV-2 to humans.
He called it "a huge report" with a lot of new knowledge, data and information, and added that information will continue to come out after the initial studies.

He also praised the good collaboration between the Chinese and international experts.

"I think the size of the report, and the amount of material and results and analysis and data in the report, speaks for itself in terms of how the collaboration went," he said.

"There would never be anything like that if we did not have a very strong, good collaboration with our colleagues in China," Embarek added.

The report was written by a joint international team made up of 17 international experts and 17 Chinese experts under a mandate from the World Health Assembly, the decision-making body of the WHO. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization participated as an observer.

The team conducted a joint study from Jan 14 to Feb 10 in Wuhan, Hubei province, following initial online meetings, according to the report.

Peter Daszak, a member of the international team, tweeted, "I do hope people actually read the huge amount of new data in the report!"

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20210 ... b2a02.html

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(Meanwhile, back at the Empire...)

8 min ago
China accuses US of "political manipulation" and lashes out at countries that criticized WHO report
From CNN's Beijing Bureau

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China's foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying holds a press conference in Beijing in December 2020. Stephen Shaver/UPI/Shutterstock

China's foreign ministry on Wednesday said it was “immoral” and “unpopular” to politicize the issue of virus origin tracing after 14 countries, including the United States, raised concerns in a joint statement on the World Health Organization report released Tuesday, following its Wuhan investigation.

“We have repeatedly emphasized that origin tracing is a scientific issue, and it should be carried out cooperatively by global scientists and cannot be politicized, which is also the consensus of most countries,” said foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying in a regular briefing Wednesday.

Hua said the joint statement questioning the report is concrete evidence that countries like the US “disrespect science” and “engage in political manipulation.”
“The politicization of origin tracing is extremely immoral and unpopular, which only hinders global cooperation and [the] global fight against the virus,” said Hua, adding the efforts run counter to the wills of the international community and will never succeed.
Governments from countries including the United States, Australia and Canada, jointly expressed concerns about the WHO report released Tuesday on COVID-19 origin tracing in China and called for independent and fully transparent evaluations with access to all relevant data in the future.

<snip>

1 hr 12 min ago
Chinese scientist calls for wider investigation into the Covid-19 origin
From CNN's Beijing Bureau

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Chinese scientist and World Health Organization team leader Liang Wannian speaks at a press conference in Beijing on March 31. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
Chinese scientist and World Health Organization team leader Liang Wannian said Wednesday that WHO should do more Covid-19 studies that cover a wider range of regions and perspectives.
“There is a consensus among scientists that the place where it was reported early is not necessarily the place where the virus first appeared,” Liang Wannian said at a news conference in Beijing Wednesday.
"Based on this, the perspective of tracing the origin of the virus must be broader.”

This comes after the WHO report into the origins of the virus, compiled by a team of international experts and their Chinese counterparts, was finally released on Tuesday after several delays.

It provides a detailed examination of the data collected by Chinese scientists and authorities from the early days of the pandemic but offers little new insight or concrete findings on where and how the virus spread to humans.

Following the release, the United States and 13 other governments, including the United Kingdom, Australia and South Korea, released a joint statement expressing concerns over the study's limited access to "complete, original data and samples."

https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news/cor ... ee6dc5fb13

So the report did what it was supposed to do and didn't do what the US wanted, which was indication that it's all the fault of the Chinese Communist Party. And so the US and it's suck-fish lackeys throw shade. Again and again CNN proves to be Uncle Sam's Good Doggy. Propaganda is the very air we breath here in "The Land of the Free"...
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

Post by blindpig » Mon Apr 05, 2021 1:27 pm

With Nicaragua, Scary Covid Projections Are More Newsworthy Than Hopeful Results
JOHN PERRY

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One year ago, as both the Trump administration in the US and the Johnson government in the UK responded fitfully to the growing pandemic, the international media were looking for whipping boys: other countries whose response to the virus was even worse.

There were some cases of obvious neglect—Brazil was and is a prime example (FAIR.org, 4/12/20). But the press also turned on Nicaragua, repeating allegations from local opposition groups that the Sandinista government was in denial about the dangers, and that the country was poised on the edge of disaster.

When, as the death toll in other countries grew alarmingly, Nicaragua “flattened the curve” of virus cases more quickly than its neighbors, its apparent success was ignored. Despite the importance of identifying how poorer countries can contain the virus effectively, measures used by Nicaragua remain uninvestigated by the international media. Why did this come about?

The media’s feeding frenzy on the Sandinista government began with the BBC. Last April, BBC World (4/4/20) claimed that President Daniel Ortega’s government had taken “no measures at all” in the face of the virus threat. It invented a media trope: Ortega’s “long absence” from public view. (He’d not appeared in person or on TV for three weeks, something not at all unusual.)

Two days later, the New York Times (4/6/20) was asking, “Where Is Daniel Ortega?,” adding that his government had been “widely criticized for its cavalier approach,” and that the public “is deeply dubious about government claims.” The Guardian (4/8/20) joined the chorus that same week, claiming that Ortega was “nowhere to be seen,” adding four days later that the “authoritarian” Ortega was one of four world leaders in denial about the virus. According to the Washington Post (4/13/20), Ortega had “vanished,” leaving a government operating a “laissez-faire approach” to the pandemic.

Not only the headlines but the substance of the stories had many similarities. A government quote (often from Vice President Rosario Murillo) was parenthesized by statements from opposition groups, or by what appeared to be independent medical bodies, such as the Committee of Multidisciplinary Scientists and the Citizens’ Observatory for Covid-19, both of which were openly supported by the opposition.

Juan Sebastián Chamorro, an opposition leader with the same excellent connections to the international media as other Chamorro family members, is the “go to” opposition voice, while frequently quoted sources are Chamorro-owned newspaper La Prensa and opposition-supporting news website Confidencial, run by Carlos F. Chamorro. (Both of these outlets and the website 100% Noticias, also strongly critical of the government, have received regular financial support from the Violeta Barrios de Chamorro Foundation, which has benefited from $4.6 million in USAID funding in the past three years.)

The international media even use reporters with close ties to the opposition. For example, the Guardian describes the Managua-based writer of its Covid-19 stories, Wilfredo Miranda, as “freelance,” but at the time he was writing regularly for Confidencial. The Guardian has a track record of using opposition-aligned journalists: In 2018, along with the Washington Post and BBC, it ran stories by Carl David Goette-Luciak, who was shown by Max Blumenthal (Canary, 9/28/18) to be working with anti-Sandinista groups. (Blumenthal’s report led to open conflict between the Canary website and the Guardian.)

Similarly, the BBC’s report on April 4 was from Dora Luz Romero, head of digital information at right-wing La Prensa, and the first quote in her story was from that newspaper’s editor-in-chief. The Managua correspondent for the New York Times, Alfonso Flores Bermúdez, makes his political sympathies clear in his Twitter feed (for example, referring to those found guilty of armed attacks in the 2018 coup attempt as political prisoners).

The pandemic confirmed trends which have been growing anyway: that it is convenient and cheaper to use local journalists, even if they are uncommitted to balanced reporting, and to give voice to opposition figures who are readily available with quotable comments, often in fluent English. In part this is because government officials are reluctant to engage with the media—a stance which can be criticized, but is a response to the derisive way their comments are treated (coverage of Ortega’s “disappearance” providing some prime examples).

In Covid denial?

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There were two main threads to the adverse media coverage in mid-2020. The first was that the Nicaraguan government was in denial about the pandemic, and either unprepared or unwilling to take the necessary steps to combat it. An article I wrote for COHA (5/30/20) last year responded to these criticisms: While the Nicaraguan government rejected the use of lockdowns as impractical in a country where most people survive on what they earn each day, and few can work without leaving home, in other respects its response to the pandemic was ahead of other countries.

Nicaragua announced its strategy much earlier (in late January, when most Western countries were still dismissing the likelihood of a pandemic); it prepared wards in 18 hospitals to receive Covid patients, and reserved one hospital solely for this purpose; it put health checks in place at points of entry to the country with mandatory quarantines, and it began a program to combat misinformation being purveyed via social media (several rounds of house-to-house visits, a free phone line, streetside clinics and more).

The measures were taken in consultation with experts in Asian countries already dealing with the crisis, such as Taiwan and South Korea, with which Nicaragua has strong links. Yet even when the government published a “white paper” (5/25/20) setting out its strategy in detail (in English as well as Spanish), it was ignored or discounted as inadequate by international media. The Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia (5/27/20), for example, dismissed it as promoting “herd immunity” when this term did not appear in the document.

If reporters had done some elementary research, they might have discovered that the plans had substance: More than one-fifth of Nicaraguan government spending goes to the public health service; it has built 19 new hospitals in 13 years, and has six more under construction. Nicaragua now has more hospital beds (1.8 per 1,000 population) than richer countries such as Mexico (1.5) and Colombia (1.7).

The second thread of criticism was that, as a result of government neglect, Covid-19 would run rampant. A huge caseload was forecast, clandestine burials were taking place, and ill-prepared health services were on the point of collapse. The BBC’s second report (5/4/20) on Nicaragua, also by Dora Luz Romero, included a prediction by a local NGO called FUNIDES that by June, there would be at least 120,000 virus cases and 650 deaths. (FUNIDES receives US government money from the National Endowment for Democracy.)

The New York Times (5/31/20) called Nicaragua “a place of midnight burials,” without noting the opposition’s practice of creating fake news items with which to confuse people. For example, Nicaraguan residents (like me) could follow pickup trucks loaded with coffins as they made meandering journeys through city streets, in blatant attempts to create panic.

The medical journal the Lancet (4/6/20) carried a report in April from 13 doctors, none based in Nicaragua, claiming that “the fragile public health infrastructure could collapse.” This was regularly cited by the general media, ignoring a response in the same journal (4/30/20) from this writer that rebutted the arguments.

Pessimists off the mark

Were the pessimists correct? No, they were widely off the mark. It is just one year since Nicaragua’s first official Covid-19 case, identified on March 18, 2020. Since then, official figures report 6,629 cases in total, whereas the unofficial Citizens’ Observatory reports double this number, 13,278. The higher figure is based on “suspected” (not tested) cases, and according to the observatory website includes “rumors” as one source of information. But even the higher figure is dramatically lower than those for adjoining countries, as this chart shows.

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Covid-19 Cases and Deaths per Million in Mexico and Central America
Source: Author calculations based on data from MINSA Nicaragua and Citizens’ Observatory for Covid-19 (3/29/21).

If deaths are counted rather than numbers of cases, Nicaragua’s official figure (26 per million inhabitants) is similarly low. The observatory’s figure for “suspicious” deaths is considerably higher (450 per million), but this includes reported pneumonia cases. In the event that these are all actually Covid cases, this would still be less than half the current Latin American average of 1,174, by official tallies. (It should be kept in mind that in most countries, the official count of Covid deaths is considerably less than the overall increase in mortality during the pandemic; if there are more deaths associated with Covid in Nicaragua than are officially tabulated, that would make the country the norm rather than the exception.)

But the statistics are not the real story. The untold and more significant one in terms of learning from the pandemic is that Nicaragua’s peak of cases and deaths was very short. Essentially it lasted for two months, from mid-May until mid-July. Half the official total cases in the past year occurred in these two months, and since then the daily total has been consistently low. (On no occasion since July has the observatory’s unofficial figure of “suspicious” cases exceeded 100 daily.)

The trend could be confirmed by talking to people working in the health service, as I did on various occasions. In late June, an epidemiologist monitoring the situation nationally told me that hospitals were reporting that the peak had passed. In July, I checked with a local hospital that was dealing with virus cases: Its intensive care unit still had Covid patients, two on ventilators, but wasn’t full. In August, the same hospital recognized the efforts of all the staff—doctors and nurses, porters and cleaners—in a moving ceremony to mark the end of the crisis, attended by many of the patients who had recovered, and who expressed their thanks for the attention they had received.

This achievement in turning the pandemic into what was, effectively, a short, sharp shock, came despite Nicaragua having no lockdowns. Adjoining countries such as Honduras, El Salvador and Costa Rica had strict lockdowns, yet had many more cases. In Costa Rica, there was a prolonged peak from September until January, an experience directly opposite to Nicaragua’s. Honduras continues to have a high incidence of the virus, with hospitals at the point of collapse even in 2021.

All the neighboring countries used the pandemic to become more authoritarian, provoking demonstrations often violently repressed by the police; Nicaragua’s measures were all advisory, not compulsory. Nevertheless, it was Nicaragua which was listed by the New York Times (7/29/20) as one of five Latin American countries where democracy “declined” during the pandemic.

What led to Nicaragua’s relative success during a period when the pandemic was rampant in neighboring countries? At this stage, no scientific study appears to have been undertaken, so any observations are speculative. One factor seems to be the relative absence of viral transmission by travelers from abroad, since (after the violent coup attempt in 2018) there were few tourists in early 2020 to bring the virus into the country. Health checks at border crossings were introduced and, together with quarantining of new arrivals, appear to have been very effective.

House-to-house visits by “health brigades,” approaching 5 million in number, served to raise awareness and combat fake news. Nicaragua’s 37,000 health personnel were all trained in handling Covid-19 at an early stage, and have long experience of controlling other viral epidemics. However, the true factors behind Nicaragua’s “flattening of the curve” of Covid cases after a short peak clearly warrant much fuller investigation.

Unrecognized success

In September, I wrote in Popular Resistance (9/22/20) that

it can only be a matter of time before Nicaragua’s effective response to the pandemic is recognized by the corporate media, especially as it is in such contrast to the experience of most other Latin American countries, and of course that of the US and the UK.

Six months later, there is still no sign of this happening. At the beginning of this year, the Wall Street Journal (1/1/21) listed eight countries which handled Covid well; Time (2/25/20) ran a piece listing 11 countries with the “best global responses” to Covid. Neither included Nicaragua.

The Guardian ran an article (12/29/20) mentioning several low-income countries from which the US and UK could learn, omitting Nicaragua. When I pointed this out in a letter published on December 31, the newspaper immediately published a reply under the headline “Nicaragua’s Covid Story Far From Truth”—noting that the opposition has its own numbers for Nicaraguan Covid cases, but not mentioning that even those numbers are far lower than those of Nicaragua’s neighbors.

What is apparent is that Nicaragua’s unconventional approach has been derided but, when it turned out to be successful, has been ignored. The Covid-19 Observatory at the University of Miami, which monitors anti-virus measures in Latin America, has a public policy adoption index which monitors measures taken to reduce social contact (stay-at-home requirements, school closures, etc.): Nicaragua has the lowest score. But as the Guardian (9/19/20) pointed out in September, much of Latin America was subject to prolonged lockdowns, inducing severe poverty, yet produced five of the top ten countries globally for incidence of the virus. (See FAIR.org, 7/30/20.) As the exception, Nicaragua’s experience should have stood out, not least because it received so much initial media attention for eschewing lockdowns and keeping schools open.

Instead, the international media continued to pour scorn. Even as the pandemic subsided in Nicaragua, the Washington Post (8/8/20) was calling the government’s response “bizarre and dangerous.” The Financial Times (10/4/20) reported Nicaragua’s Covid statistics in October, but gave the impression that the numbers of cases were exceptionally high, part of “a worsening economic and social crisis.” As recently as this February, the Guardian (2/19/21) criticized Nicaragua’s “stumbling response to the coronavirus pandemic” in a cynical and misleading report characterizing the country’s efforts to monitor the use of its air space for satellites and other near-space activities as a grandiose “space agency.”

The picture that emerges is one where there was considerably more coverage of dire predictions than of the surprisingly mild outcome as the pandemic ran its course. Covid-19 was a convenient issue on which the Sandinista government, regularly criticized by the international media, could be attacked again.

Journalists, who should be more skeptical of negative reports from local opposition media and NGOs whose political alignment is well-known, simply repeated them as reliable indications of a disaster waiting to happen. Their apocalyptic warnings strengthened the media’s narrative that the Sandinista government is failing its people. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that politically useful guesses were found to be more newsworthy than politically inconvenient reality.

https://fair.org/home/with-nicaragua-sc ... l-results/

I remember hearing some of this jive on npr last year and thinking "wtf!". I shudda known better, if it's about the 'enemies of imperialism' and coming from the slaves of capitalism it's a sure bet to be lies. The Guardian, formerly regarded as 'leftish', is a particularly nasty trap. It should be regarded as no more honest than the New York Times.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

Post by blindpig » Sat Apr 17, 2021 1:47 pm

Chinese vaccines do not have high efficacy rates?
By WANG XIAOYU | CHINA DAILY | Updated: 2021-04-13 09:16

Rumor: Some media reports claimed Chinese vaccines do not have high efficacy rates.

Fact:

Gao Fu, director-general of Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, has made it clear that boosting vaccine protection is a question of global concern, not only for China.

During a forum held on Saturday, Gao proposed upgrading immunization procedures or mixing doses using different technologies as ways to further improve vaccine effectiveness.

However, some media reports have misinterpreted his statement as claiming that Chinese vaccines do not have high efficacy rates, the scientist said.

"They (media reports) are misleading and have taken my words out of context," Gao said during an interview with online media outlet Guancha.cn on Sunday.

"The World Health Organization requires all COVID-19 vaccines to have an efficacy rate of 50 percent or higher, and to be effective in preventing severe infections and deaths. All approved vaccines meet these standards," he said.

Worldwide, nearly 270 COVID-19 vaccine candidates are in different stages of development, and 21 of them have completed or are undergoing the third and late stage of human trials, Gao said at the forum.

"Testing data on vaccines being researched around the world are varying, with some higher and some lower. Further improving vaccines' protection rates is worth considering for global scientists and from a global perspective," he was quoted by Guancha.cn as saying.

The quest includes China, but is not limited to China, he added.

Gao said new approaches mentioned in his speech, such as combining different vaccines, changing the number of doses and the length of time between each dose, points to possible pathways for research in the future.

"It is the first time for humans to get COVID-19 vaccines, and current immunization procedures are deduced from past experiences with other vaccines in use," Gao said.

Further improvements

"Though outcomes are very satisfying so far, we will be able to make further improvements based on specific features of the novel coronavirus and the mass immunization situation," he said at the forum, adding that the international community will need to address a number of scientific questions on COVID-19 vaccines in the future.

Many global health experts have cautioned against fixating on comparing the effectiveness rates of different vaccines and overlooking their role in reducing deaths and hospitalizations.

David Kennedy, an infectious disease expert at Pennsylvania State University in the United States, said during an earlier interview with top scientific journal Nature that because of different definitions of key criteria, such as what amounts to a severe episode of COVID-19 illness, and various localities for clinical trials, it is not possible to rank vaccines solely based on trial results.

Zheng Zhongwei, a National Health Commission official who heads China's COVID-19 vaccine development task force, said on Saturday that clinical trials show that all domestic vaccines can prevent severe cases and deaths at nearly 100 percent.

"This means a lot for each individual. To put it simply, the worst result for a person who is infected after inoculation is something like a common cold," he said. "More attention should be paid to the much lower rates of deaths and serious infections through vaccination."

China has issued conditional approval to four domestically made vaccines and granted emergency use approval to one domestic candidate. Three different technologies have been deployed in these products.

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202104/1 ... b50fc.html

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Sinovac vaccine prevents 67% of symptomatic COVID-19 infections: Chilean study
Xinhua | Updated: 2021-04-17 16:18

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A healthcare worker prepares a dose of Sinovac's CoronaVac coronavirus disease vaccine at a vaccination center in Santiago, Chile March 17, 2021. [Photo/Agencies]

SANTIAGO -- The CoronaVac vaccine developed by Chinese pharmaceutical firm Sinovac is up to 67 percent effective in preventing symptomatic COVID-19, Chile's Ministry of Health said on Friday.

Rafael Araos, doctor and advisor to the Undersecretariat of Public Health, announced the efficacy finding during the presentation of the results of a study titled "Effectiveness of the inactivated CoronaVac vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 in Chile."

The study also showed the vaccine to be up to 85 percent effective in preventing hospitalization, 89 percent effective in preventing admission to an intensive care unit, and 80 percent effective in preventing death caused by the novel coronavirus disease, said Araos.

A vaccine's efficacy is the protection it provides under real-life conditions and the results of the study were based on CoronaVac's effectiveness 14 days after the second dose, explained Araos, who is also the former head of epidemiology at the Health Ministry.

Health officials said the report was preliminary and would be updated monthly.

During the same presentation, Chilean Health Minister Enrique Paris said the vaccine being used by Chile "is showing effectiveness."

"We have to continue vaccinating and we cannot relax self-care measures," he added.

The study considered about 10.5 million people aged 16 or older, and was carried out comparing those who were fully and partially immunized with CoronaVac and those yet to be vaccinated.

Chile launched its mass vaccination drive in February, after first inoculating healthcare workers in December 2020 and January 2021.

As of Thursday, a total of 7,664,226 people in Chile were vaccinated against COVID-19, representing about 50 percent of the target population of 15 million.

http://covid-19.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202 ... b636e.html

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Over 187m COVID-19 vaccine doses administered across China
Xinhua | Updated: 2021-04-17 16:15

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Residents receive COVID-19 vaccination at a temporary vaccination site in Beijing, March 25, 2021. [Photo/Xinhua]

BEIJING -- More than 187.36 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines had been administered across China as of Friday, the National Health Commission said Saturday.

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202104/1 ... b636a.html

It should be noted that due to it's highly superior social response to the pandemic China does no have the screaming immediate need to vaccinate it's entire population ASAP. Their death rate is relatively minuscule, their economy is humming. Thus they are able to help nations with greater immediate needs while the US hoards and spews venom.

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World needs Chinese vaccines to fill supply shortage: media
Xinhua | Updated: 2021-04-17 18:06

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A worker checks a container of CanSino COVID-19 vaccines at Islamabad International Airport in Islamabad, Pakistan, on March 30, 2021. [Photo/Xinhua]

WASHINGTON -- The world needs China's vaccines as they have filled the vaccine shortage caused by some rich countries' hoarding of COVID-19 vaccines, an opinion piece published on Bloomberg's website said on Friday.

"By hoarding vaccines, the Western world has left many in emerging economies uncovered. While more than 848 million doses have been administered, countries with the highest incomes are getting vaccinated 25 times faster than those with the lowest," said the article written by Clara Ferreira Marques, a columnist with Bloomberg.

According to Bloomberg's COVID-19 tracker, the United States, which makes up about 4 percent of the world's population, has 24 percent of vaccinations, the article said.

What's more, the article noted that the Chinese vaccines are highly effective against severe diseases, which can significantly reduce the number of hospitalizations.

"For emerging economies like the Philippines or Brazil, it's important to stop infection, but vital to avoid severe cases and to keep people out of hospitals, where they can rapidly overwhelm healthcare networks that are rickety at the best of times," the report said.

The article also cited Indonesia as an example and said that as a major recipient of Sinovac doses that needs to vaccinate 180 million people within a year, the country is not wrong that "the best vaccine is the one that's available."

"A population that has very high coverage of Sinovac would certainly have far fewer severe COVID-19 cases, even with substantial infection and transmission," Benjamin Cowling, professor at the University of Hong Kong's School of Public Health, was quoted by the article as saying.

"That's a win of sorts," Cowling points out.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20210 ... b638c.html
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

Post by blindpig » Fri Apr 23, 2021 2:12 pm

The Catastrophes of the Pandemic are the Catastrophes of Capitalism

Make no mistake: Business interests trump public health.
Abstract: For capitalist governments, maintaining conditions conducive to the profit-making interests of business owners and investors is the top priority; public health, only so far as it is necessary to maintain an adequate supply of labor, is not. Understanding this helps explain (i) why many capitalist governments have, in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, exhibited a high tolerance for public health catastrophes that could have been averted if only even mild measures had been taken to temporarily subordinate business interests to the public good, and (ii) why countries led by people-centered governments have performed better in protecting public health against the pestilence of COVID-19 than capitalist governments as a whole. This article demonstrates the second point empirically, via an analysis of cross-sectional country-level data bearing on the performance of people-centered vs. capital-centered governments in protecting the health of their citizens in the face of the coronavirus pandemic.

Stephen Gowans

April 21, 2021

For days, doctors and scientists in Canada’s largest province, Ontario, had offered the government the same advice: close non-essential businesses for a few weeks to avert a looming public health crisis. Coronavirus infections were spreading rapidly in the workplace, in factories, in warehouses, and on construction sites. Workers who were infected on the job, were bringing the virus home to their loved ones. With new cases growing daily at an accelerating rate, hospital beds filling up, a backlog of surgeries growing ever larger, and COVID-19 therapeutics becoming scarce, the public health care system teetered on the edge of an abyss. Strong measures were needed.

The government acted. It prohibited virtually every activity that could potentially create a super-spreader event—except one, the most significant: employees of non-essential businesses co-mingling at work. This was the engine of the new third wave. And yet the government refused to turn the engine off.

Critical care physicians, ICU nurses, and epidemiologists were bewildered. Why had the government ignored their advice to shutter non-essential businesses? Why was it refusing to implement measures to prevent suffering and save lives?

The director of the committee the government had set up to make science-based recommendations said he was “at a loss” to understand why the “government announced a suite of measures that didn’t account for his group’s advice.” Another panel member said “he was dumbfounded by the government’s rejection of science and common sense.” A third said “she and her colleagues were stunned.”

One critical care physician, interviewed on TV, said that she had been “reflecting on why this happened and one thing that occurred to me is that the role of government is to protect the citizens.” Why, then, was the government failing to do so?

Incompetence?

Governments are often accused of ineptitude when they behave in ways that lead to catastrophe. The disastrous handling of the COVID-19 pandemic by the Trump administration in the United States, and the botched response of the Johnson government in the United Kingdom, are often attributed to mismanagement. It’s as if some governments don’t know what they’re doing.

But the only way to know whether a government is incompetent, is to evaluate its actions against its goals. If you say my weight loss plan is a masterpiece of ineptitude because I’ve gained ten pounds, you’re right, assuming my goal is to lose weight. But if my goal is to manage my weight as best I can while gorging on pastries every day, your assessment is off the mark.

The trouble with declaring a government inept is that we may be mistaken about what the government is truly trying to achieve. Too often we make the wrong assumption about the goals that guide a government’s actions.

The critical care physician mentioned above assumed the public health goal of the government was to protect its citizens. And all the advice she offered took this assumption as its starting point. The obvious dissonance between protecting public health as a goal and the government’s failing to do what was necessary to achieve this goal, left her dumbfounded.

One way she could have resolved her puzzlement was to ask whether the government was pursuing a different goal. In fact, at one point she conceded rather tentatively and with much reluctance—as if the thought was too unsettling to contemplate—that maybe the government was more committed to the interests of business owners than to the welfare of the larger community.

As unthinkable as the thought may be, could it be that the true role of government in capitalist society is not to protect its citizens, but to protect what lies at the very heart of capitalism itself: profits? If so, then what seems at first to be government ineptitude, may, to the contrary, be government acting as it ought to act (or must act) within the framework of a capitalist logic.

It would hardly be surprising to discover that the Ontario government has a strong affinity with the business community. Its members are part of that community, and came to power on a platform of catering to its (and their) interests. They promised citizens they would deliver jobs and prosperity in return for allowing businesses to generate handsome profits.

For the head of the government, profits are not only critical, but personal. He is the co-owner of a manufacturing firm—one of the non-essential businesses that scientists advised him to temporarily shutter. Heeding their advice and ‘following the science’ would have had a direct and unwelcome effect on his bank account.

Members of his cabinet are no less married to profits. They include: a former investment banker and insurance company executive; the founder of an advertising business; a corporate/commercial lawyer; a former chamber of commerce president; and a financial analyst, the daughter of a former CEO, prime minister, and member of multiple corporate boards; she is married to an investment banker who is the scion of a wealthy publishing family. One would hardly be going out on a limb to suggest that this group might have a greater preference for keeping the profit spigot open than keeping the polloi—with its lowly factory, warehouse, and construction workers—safe from a pandemic.

It’s also probably safe to assume that the cabinet members are all ambitious people who hope, when their political careers are over, to secure lucrative positions in the C-suites or on the boards of major corporations. They know their ambitions are more likely to be realized if they have acquitted themselves admirably in government as able defenders of the business community against the democratic demands of the public. Sacrificing profits to public welfare could not possibly recommend them to high-level, munificently remunerated private sector opportunities.

This is not to say that the Ontario government is indifferent to public health, only that public health comes second, and not at all, if one must be sacrificed to the other. The metaphor of sampling delights at a local bakery (protecting profits) while paying some heed to weight-management (protecting public health) illustrates the relationship. Capitalist governments like to say they’re protecting public health, and they are, to a point, but they’re only doing so, so far as they don’t endanger the health of the most important patient—profits.

Who gets harmed by a business-first, public health-second policy? In the case of the Ontario government, not its cabinet. After all, its members have been vaccinated, and have access to private medicine or connections that allow them to get priority access to the public health care system, even one under stress. And while the people who go to work every day in factories, warehouses, and construction sites will, along with their families, bear the brunt of the escalating crisis, what does it matter from the perspective of the business community and their representatives in government? In a capitalist system, factory, warehouse, and construction workers exist for one purpose: to promote shareholder value. Those who the virus ushers along the path from workplace to sick bed to cemetery, to no longer serve their useful function as means to shareholder ends, are easily replaced. The business-friendly fiscal, monetary, and immigration policies of the Ontario government’s federal counterpart have seen to that; they have underwritten a reserve army of potential replacement employees, ready to rapidly fill whatever void the virus creates.

From this perspective, the decision of the government to ignore its science panel’s advice to close non-essential businesses makes perfect sense. Seeing the logic in the decision requires that we ask: Government for who? Policy for who? Democracy for who? If the pandemic policies of the Trump and Johnson governments were disasters, who were they disasters for? They may have been catastrophic for the bulk of US and British citizens, but were they disasters for major investors and shareholders?

In a multitude of ways the interests of private profit-making enterprises, and those of the public, are antithetical. Businesses have an interest in paying their employees as little as possible, and employees have an interest in resisting their exploitation, and eliminating it altogether. The public has an interest in clean air and water, and polluters have an interest in shifting the costs of remediating pollution to the public. Employers have an interest in making their employees work under unsafe conditions if it means healthier bottom lines, and employees have an interest in safeguarding their health.

In competitions that pit investors and shareholders against employees and consumers, businesses often come out on top. Their ownership and control of the economy equip them with the resources and leverage they need to ensure their policy preferences are transformed into policy directives—not always, but most of the time. They do so by ensuring their representatives are elected to public office, by funding think tanks to propagate their policy preferences, and by lobbying governments to adopt policies that are congenial to corporate aspirations.

Moreover, the business community sets the ideological tenor of the times. It influences public opinion through its ownership of the mass media and influences the academic agenda by endowing university chairs and funding research programs. As a result, a pro-business ideology is instilled in politicians long before they arrive in government.

In an analysis of over 1,700 public policy issues, political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page concluded that “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial impacts on government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.” [1]

In other words, the demos, the ordinary people referred to in the word ‘democracy’, have virtually no influence on public policy, while wealthy business people and their lobbies and representatives in government, who constitute only a tiny fraction of the population, have substantial sway. G7 countries, and many others in the world, are not democracies, but plutocracies, countries ruled by the wealthy. And the public health policy of a plutocracy is one which, not always, but for the most part, addresses the concerns, interests and aspirations of the country’s financial and business center, not Main Street.

If government policy makes no sense within the logic of public welfare, but makes perfect sense within the logic of capitalism, the reason why is plain; it’s not incompetence that leads governments to stumble into public health catastrophes; it is capitalist logic that produces public health catastrophes as a by-product of the pursuit of capitalist interests.

A publicly-owned and publicly-directed economy is preferable to one predicated on a capitalist logic, for three reasons.

#1. A public system is specifically designed to redress the capitalist shortcomings and inequities that affect the lives of the majority.

#2. Democracy. Capitalism, by definition, is a system for privileging capitalists, an infinitesimally tiny elite, at public expense. In contrast, a public system—which is accountable to the public at large rather than a small minority of private business owners—is democratic, by definition.

#3. People matter more in a public system. This can be seen in the superior pandemic performance of countries that have moved, to varying degrees, toward the ideal of public-ownership and planning of their economies, namely, Cuba, North Korea (DPRK), China (PRC), and Vietnam—countries led by what I’ve called Communist, or people-centered, governments. While none of these countries has achieved the ideal, they are the furthest along the path.

In the graph below, I’ve shown per capita fatality rates for four Communist countries, as well as for major capitalist powers. I’ve also included capitalist countries and jurisdictions in East Asia and Oceania which have performed well in pandemic management. Since a country’s ability to manage a public health crisis ought to vary proportionally with income, I’ve juxtaposed fatality data against GDP per capita.

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The graph shows that countries with higher incomes (Italy, France, the UK, and the USA) have performed poorly in protecting the health of their citizens, while the four Communist countries have performed well, despite having considerably lower incomes and therefore fewer resources for pestilence-management. The graph also shows that with the exception of Cuba, the best performers have been the East Asian and Oceanic countries, both capital- and people-centered.

The graph below shows that the three East Asian Communist countries have performed better than South Korea (ROK), Japan, and Australia, but only as well as Taiwan and New Zealand. However, the region’s people-centered countries have achieved comparable levels of pandemic management despite lower per capita incomes than their capitalist regional counterparts.

Image

The final graph compares the four people-centered countries with the capitalist world as a whole. Clearly, the East Asian and Oceanic capital-centered countries are anomalies, and the performance of the capitalist countries as a category has been significantly worse than that of the Communist countries in protecting their citizens from COVID-19.

Moreover, the superior public health performance of the people-centered countries has been achieved with significantly fewer resources than are available to capitalist countries, which have higher incomes per capita, and therefore more resources to protect public health if they choose to allocate their resources to this project. This finding suggests that Communist countries are not only more committed to safeguarding the health of their citizens, but do so with greater efficiency, since they have achieved better outcomes with fewer resources. This is consistent with the well-established finding that public systems deliver better public health outcomes at lower cost than private systems.

Image

The graph also demonstrates that the idea that the public health role of government is to protect its citizens, while valid in connection with people-centered countries, is invalid as a description of capital-centered countries as a whole. Clearly, in the capitalist world, business interests trump public health.

Together, the graphs also show that public health disasters and recurring waves of infection are not inevitable outcomes of the coronavirus pandemic, and that it is possible to provide a high level of public health protection against the dangers of COVID-19, even with limited resources. Given that the people-centered governments have performed admirably without wide-spread vaccination roll-outs, it can also be concluded that vaccination is not the sole route to public health protection in the face of a novel virus. It is widely believed in the leading capitalist countries that vaccines are the offramp from the pandemic, but the data presented here suggest that it was capitalist logic that steered most countries onto the pandemic freeway in the first instance—a freeway on which the Communist countries have never travelled.

An objection to this analysis is that Communist China and Vietnam are not people-centered but profit-centered, since both have embraced capitalism. While it is true that these countries have flourishing private sectors, it also true that they have substantial and growing public sectors and significant state planning. According to the International Labor Organization, seventy percent of Chinese employees work in the public sector, not far off the public sector employment rate of seventy-seven percent in Cuba. Moreover, Communist parties remain in charge, and while China and Vietnam may appear, at first glance, to be Communist in name alone, the red flag continues to fly in Beijing and Hanoi. In Bright Red: The Chinese Communist Ideal, [2] French Sinologist Alice Ekman examines the Chinese Communist Party’s internal documents and concludes that China’s true color remains red. China’s orientation toward capitalism compared to that of the United States, in which there is no ambiguity about its capitalist identity, is perhaps best illustrated by the following observation from the Wall Street Journal. “A figure like [Apple’s Tim] Cook commands a great deal of respect, even deference, in Washington. In Beijing, he’s treated like any other business executive—as a supplicant, angling for favors to keep his market hopes alive.” [3] In other words, unlike in capitalist countries, where government is but the means to capitalist ends, in China, capitalists are but the means to Communist ends.

Pandemics are inevitable. Whether they become disasters is contingent on who is prioritized by the underlying logic of a society’s organization. As the data above suggest, it is in capitalist countries, where capitalist logic elevates the interests of a tiny minority of wealthy business-owners above public health interests, that the coronavirus pandemic has become a disaster. In contrast, in Communist countries, where capitalist logic has either been eliminated or subordinated to Communist goals, public health has been protected to a degree far in excess of what is true of capitalist countries as a whole. Avoiding future pandemic disasters will depend on learning the lessons that the public health catastrophes of COVID-19 have been the catastrophes of capitalism, its successes the successes of people-centered Communism, and that a pandemic of catastrophes need not happen the next time a zoonotic pathogen breaches the species barrier. Whether we, in the capitalist world, meet the next public health crisis as effectively as China, Vietnam, Cuba, and North Korea have met the challenge of COVID-19, will depend on the choices we make about whether to transition to a democracy where our common interests are brought to the fore, or whether we continue to accept our subordination to a capitalist logic in which we are only the means to capitalist ends.

Sources

GDP per capita (PPP), The World Factbook, Central Intelligence Agency.

“Mortality Analyses”. Johns Hopkins University, Coronavirus Resource Center, March 28, 2021. Accessed on 7 March 2014.

Notes

1.Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, “Testing theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” Perspectives on Politics, Fall, 2014.

2. English translation of the book’s French title, Rouge Vif: L’Idéal Communiste Chinois.

3. Andrew Browne, “China’s dream is Apple’s nightmare: US tech firms cave for Beijing’s rules,” The Wall Street Journal, August 8, 2017.

DPRK. While there are no solid COVID-19 data for North Korea, there are a number of indications that the country’s infection and fatality rates are low. First, we can assume that the factors that have uniquely contributed to the superior performance of East Asian countries in managing the pandemic also apply to the DPRK as a fellow East Asian state. Second, a number of news reports refer to Pyongyang implementing vigorous measures of pandemic control. For example, the New York Times’ Korea specialist Choe Sang-Hun reported on July 25, 2020 that “North Korea has taken some of the most drastic actions of any country against the virus, and did so sooner than most other nations.” It is clear from the example of China, that countries that have prioritized public health, and have acted quickly and decisively to curb the spread of the coronavirus, have achieved impressive levels of infection control. Additionally, the Wall Street Journal reported on February 26, 2021, that “Alexander Matsegora, Russia’s ambassador to North Korea, said on the embassy’s Facebook page earlier this month that ‘thanks to the most severe bans and restrictions, [North Korea] turned out to be the only country which didn’t get the infection.’”

Given these reports, along with North Korea’s reported commitment to effectively managing the pestilence, and its unquestioned ability to manage other crises, including the collapse of its foreign markets in the early 1990s, flood- and drought-induced famines in the same decade, and the unremitting threat of US aggression, it seems highly likely that the DPRK has responded to the threat of COVID-19 with a high degree of competence. Accordingly, for this analysis, DPRK deaths per 100,000 were set to the minimum for all other countries.

Taiwan. While the analyses include Taiwan, the territory is not recognized here as a separate country, but as a part of China under the control of the government of the Republic of China. Since the ROC offers an example of a capital-centered government in contradistinction to the PRC’s more people-centered approach, its inclusion in the analyses as a separate jurisdiction was warranted.

https://gowans.blog/author/gowans/

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Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

Post by blindpig » Mon Apr 26, 2021 11:59 am

Let's count the money "in other people's pockets": a little about Big Pharma's income from Covid-19 and about who paid for the development of vaccines
04/25/2021

Just business, just capitalism

Ahead of shareholder meetings at giant pharmaceutical corporations, the People's Vaccine Alliance has calculated that over the past 12 months, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca have paid their shareholders $ 26 billion in dividends and ransom payments , according to PSI. This amount would be enough to vaccinate 1.3 billion people , or the entire population of Africa.

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Meetings of shareholders of Johnson & Johnson, Moderna and Astra Zeneca will be held in the coming weeks, the first one - of Pfizer shareholders - was held on April 22, the birthday of a man whose name is rightfully considered a symbol of the fight not only against abstract inequality, but also for free and equal access for everyone. a person to education, health care, scientific achievements - for that very progressive society in which "the free development of everyone is a condition for the free development of all . "

During the meetings, PSI writes, protests are expected against the actual privatization of successful vaccines against Covid-19 and pressure on pharmaceutical companies to openly license their intellectual property and share technology and know-how with qualified vaccine manufacturers around the world. ...

While the global economy remains frozen due to the slow and uneven deployment of vaccinations around the world, the skyrocketing incomes of vaccine manufacturers have created a new wave of billionaires. At the same time, the International Chamber of Commerce predicts a loss of $ 9 trillion in global GDP due to global inequality in vaccines.

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Big Pharma Shareholder Returns 2020 (billions of US dollars)

The report Global Justice Now called "horror stories big pharma: why we can not trust the pharmaceutical companies a leading role in the fight against coronavirus," they say, that the profits of the largest corporations in the 6 "coronavirus" market last year amounted to 46 billion dollars. And judging by the revenue, Johnson & Johnson is richer than non-poor countries such as New Zealand and Hungary. Pfizer has more revenue than oil-rich Kuwait or Malaysia.

“We must not let corporations decide who survives and who dies while increasing their profits. We need a vaccine for humans, not a vaccine for profit. Vaccine apartheid is not a natural occurrence, but the result of governments backing down and allowing corporations to place their bets. Rather than creating new vaccine billionaires, we need to vaccinate billions of people in developing countries, ”says Oxfam Health Policy Manager Anna Marriott . "It's appalling that Big Pharma is making huge payouts to wealthy shareholders in the face of this global health emergency."

While one in four citizens of rich countries received the vaccine, in poorer countries it has been available to only one in five hundred people so far, meaning that the death toll will continue to rise as the virus remains uncontrolled. Epidemiologists predict we have less than a year before mutations can render existing vaccines ineffective.

One of the reasons pharmaceutical corporations have been able to make such large profits is due to intellectual property regulations that restrict the ability of multiple companies to manufacture.

More than 100 low- and middle-income countries, led by India and South Africa, are calling on the WTO to drop intellectual property protection for products aimed at combating Covid-19 during the pandemic. However, the United States, the EU and other rich countries are still opposed to this. Although the Biden administration is reportedly considering removing US objections to such a refusal.

Moderna, Pfizer / BioNtech, Johnson & Johnson, Novovax and Oxford / AstraZeneca have received billions of dollars of government funding and guaranteed pre-orders, including $ 12 billion from the US government alone. They also used years of government funded research and discoveries. A group of researchers from the UAEM organization, found that only 3% of R&D costs for the Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccine and its underlying technology were privately financed. The vaccine, being developed by the University of Oxford, was to be produced on a non-exclusive and free basis. However, after the conclusion of the deal with AstraZeneca, the situation has changed. The deal is now exclusive, and while the company claims it will not make a profit during the pandemic, it has not disclosed the details of its contract and how it calculates research costs, according to the Global Justice Now report .

“These vaccines were funded by government funds and are desperately needed around the world if we are to end this pandemic,” said Heidi Chou , senior manager at Global Justice Now. “It is moral bankruptcy for governments in rich countries to allow a small group of corporations to keep vaccine technology under lock and key by selling limited doses to the highest bidder,” Chou added.

The successful Moderna and Pfizer / BioNTech mRNA vaccines are set to become two of the top three selling pharmaceutical products in the world. The companies are forecasting $ 33.5 billion in revenues from their vaccines in 2021.

Their vaccines are the most expensive: from $ 13.5 to $ 74 per course, with both firms seeking to raise prices. For example, it became known that in a conversation with an investor, Pfizer named from $ 150 to $ 170 per dose as the usual price it receives for vaccines. Whereas a study from Imperial College London showed that the cost of producing new mRNA vaccines can range from $ 0.6 to $ 2 per dose.

Both companies sold the vast majority of doses of the vaccine produced to wealthy countries (for Moderna, this is 97% of doses, for Pfizer, 85%). The Moderna vaccine, developed in partnership with the US government's National Institutes of Health, is estimated to generate $ 5 billion in revenue in 2021. At the same time, the company received $ 5.45 billion in government subsidies. The company is expected to charge $ 64 to $ 74 per person for immunizations.
All major pharmaceutical companies strongly oppose the open exchange of technology and the suspension of intellectual property protection.
Pfizer CEO Albert Burla , commenting on WHO's efforts to share technology in order to allow other qualified manufacturers to produce vaccines, said it was "nonsense and ... it's also dangerous . "

And he is undoubtedly right. Is this what they teach in MBA courses at prestigious business schools? “If you have an exclusive and highly demanded product, give the technology of its production to someone else for free”? And, indeed, nonsense. This is some kind of communism! Any business school graduate will tell you: "crisis is a time of opportunity." For some - at the expense of others. And the main secret of those very mythical "entrepreneurial abilities"from which the profit is taken is to be among the first. Here someone naively may ask: what about the fact that most of the research was funded by the state, i.e. society - is there not in this certain elements of communism, only one-sidedly directed? When a corporation receives from the state everything it needs - “according to needs”, and gives something in return to society - with the greatest benefit for itself. And this - for those who have forgotten - is the most that neither is classical capitalism: "the social nature of production and private distribution" - for very few private pockets. As for the stories about “money from entrepreneurial abilities,” it is so that sales of business consultants' services go better (by the way, the demand for them, by the way, has especially increased during the crisis ).

However, if we talk personally about Mr. Burla, the head of Pfizer, we do not know if he went to business school; it is only known that he is a veterinarian and a Ph.D. Try to take a philosophical look at the flock that needs to be sheared. Especially if behind the back are the owners of the farm, who, having not received enough wool, will quickly find a replacement for you, and you will join the number of "sheared". That's the same! Here, perhaps, any sheep (believing that one day it will also become shepherds or shearers) will bleed out of its corner: "True, nonsense! .. How can you refuse profit?"

Well, what will Man say in this situation?

https://www.rotfront.su/poschitaem-deng ... rmanah-ne/

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Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

Post by blindpig » Mon May 03, 2021 11:18 am

Despite India disaster, U.S. government refuses COVID vaccine patent waivers
Kenya Elliot and Leela AnandMay 2, 2021 154 4 minutes read

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A deadly second wave of COVID-19 is raging through India. The country is seeing more than 3,000 deaths and hundreds of thousands of cases every single day. At least 200,000 have died thus far. Modeling data shows that the death count is likely twice as high as the official numbers.

Hospitals in India are over capacity and in need of oxygen, personal protective equipment, beds, COVID-related medications, ventilators and other medical supplies. Crematorium workers are working around the clock — burning body after body. Bodies are having to be burned on the roadside. There is no doubt that India’s poorest are facing the brunt of this crisis in a country with a severely underfunded public healthcare sector.

With India reporting over 19 million total cases, it is now only second to the United States. It is suspected that a new variant of the coronavirus could be the cause of the devastating second wave. India has thus far managed to administer approximately 150 million first doses and 26 million second doses. The population of India is 1.4 billion.

Biden administration puts profits over human lives

Despite the dire situation, the White House initially refused to lift the ban in place on the export of the raw materials needed to manufacture the vaccine. The Biden administration attempted to justify this by claiming that they were concerned with U.S. public health, and that they were prioritizing vaccinating people in the United States.

Last month, the Serum Institute of India — the world’s biggest vaccine producer — requested that the Biden administration lift the ban on vaccine raw material exports to address the deadly crisis. Despite India being ostensibly the United States’ ally, U.S. State Department spokesperson Ned Price said the United States’ top priority is vaccinating itself first.

This outraged and angered many in India and around the world. In the face of heavy international pressure and criticism, the U.S. government backpedaled and sent assistance to India. The U.S. government now promises to provide raw materials and medical equipment, and share its 60 million doses of AstraZeneca vaccine reserves if federal safety regulations clear.

But the damage has been done. The United States dragged its feet while thousands of Indians died and is now only acting to save face. It was only this international pressure and criticism that forced the Biden administration to relent and agree to transfer raw materials needed to make vaccines in India. And this has not had a detrimental impact on U.S. residents’ ability to access the vaccine.

The United States has played a leading role in obstructing the distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine to the billions of people in the world that are still in need — creating effectively a system of vaccine apartheid. The governments of the United States, United Kingdom, and the European Union nations have made deals with private pharmaceutical companies to reserve vaccine supplies. Only 7% percent of the global population is fully vaccinated, while the governments of the wealthiest nations in the world have purchased over half of the global vaccine supply.

The United States remains opposed to supporting the Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) waiver. Under World Trade Organization rules, the WTO can invoke the waiver of certain intellectual property (IP) rights on specific technologies, including pharmaceutical developments. Recognizing the detrimental impact of intellectual property barriers on global health, over 100 developing countries are calling for a waiver of IP rights related to the COVID vaccines until much of the world is vaccinated and develops immunity to the virus. But while countries like India suffer catastrophic COVID-19 spikes, Biden refuses to support the waivers, despite the huge numbers of people who are dying due to lack of access to vaccines.

The motivation behind Biden’s decision to initially refuse to send aid to India and the reason that he has not supported waving vaccine patents are the same — profit. Thousands who could be saved are dying every day because the therapeutic, technological and scientific advancements made by tens of thousands of scientists and workers over the years remain the private property of a few capitalists.

It is the work of countless people around the world — collaborating and corresponding on research of viruses and vaccines — over the course of this crisis and over the decades that allowed the COVID vaccines to be developed at a rapid pace. Billions in public spending was invested into the private sector to produce these medical advancements. The United States spent $18 billion of taxpayer money on the production and distribution of COVID vaccines — and yet these vaccines remain hostage to private pharmaceutical corporations.

India’s loyalty to U.S. government a death sentence for Indians

The far-right Modi government in India has criminally mismanaged the pandemic. In India, Modi’s far right BJP party has neither built emergency hospitals nor taken over ruthless private hospitals profiting from disease. The sales of public assets and tax breaks for the capitalist class continues to be the trend under Modi.

The Modi government is an ally and strategic partner of the United States, which has enlisted India in its “Indo-Pacific Quad” alliance against China. The United States is deepening its alliances as it further pivots to Asia, positioning itself for “major power conflict” to secure U.S. global hegemony and contain China. The United States’ callous response to India’s COVID crisis reveals the inequality, weakness and unreliability of this partnership.

Since the start of the pandemic, China has been recognized as a leader for both its effectiveness in tackling the coronavirus domestically and its international aid efforts. While the United States has acted slowly and reluctantly when India reached out for assistance, China’s government has offered COVID aid to India on its own initiative several times.

Outrageously, the Modi government has tacitly refused China’s offer by choosing to not even engage in dialogue despite India’s current emergency. Recently, India was invited by Beijing to attend a meeting for South Asian countries to establish a COVID-19 emergency supplies reserve, and India did not even attend.

The Modi government has chosen to be loyal towards its U.S. allies despite the role the Biden administration has played in exacerbating the crisis. The true motivation behind the U.S. government’s criminal withholding of support for the intellectual property waivers is a desire to protect the profits of corporations and capitalists over human lives. In order for poor and working class people worldwide to have access to the vaccines — and ensure that everyone is able to obtain the resources that they need to protect themselves from COVID-19 — we need vaccine patents to be waived, and to prioritize the needs and lives of the people over the greed and profits of pharmaceutical corporations.

https://www.liberationnews.org/despite- ... rationnews

Property is theft? Property is death! Worse than negligence, this is willful murder.
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Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

Post by blindpig » Sat May 08, 2021 2:38 pm

Vaccine Patents = Mass Murder
May 7, 2021
The row over waiving patents on Covid vaccines reveals the inhuman logic of intellectual property

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by Paul Demarty

As a new wave of Covid-19 rips through many countries, notably India, Argentina and Brazil, it is disconcerting to look on from the vantage point of a country where things are — for now — well under control, with over half the population at least partly vaccinated.

With scientific opinion — and plain common sense — united in the certainty that Britain and the few other rich countries which have had a successful vaccination program still cannot protect themselves so long as some of the most populous countries on earth are effectively giant Petri dishes for the emergence of new variants of the virus, scrutiny must rightly fall on Britain’s failure to aid the global effort adequately. And, while much of the discussion focuses on how many spare vaccine shots are ‘donated,’ there is a far more serious moral failure on display in the present situation.

That is the matter of the patents on the various vaccines so far developed. Many countries in the global south have pleaded for the patents to be waived temporarily; but the response — from Britain and especially the European Union, where most of the vaccines were developed — has been foot-dragging at best and stonewalling at worst. It need hardly be stressed that every minute’s delay means more fatalities; so the interference of pharmaceutical companies and their ‘friends’ in government amounts to mass murder.

It is not only the pharmaceutical firms who have a hand in this sordid saga. In some ways it began last year, when researchers at Oxford University declared their intention to freely release their vaccine formula, in the hope that it would be made more widely available and also feed into further research. Bill Gates decided to talk them out of it, and thus was born the ‘partnership’ with AstraZeneca. On the face of it this was a baffling act, as if Gates had decided suddenly to pack in his smug philanthropy altogether and resolved, like Milton’s Satan, that “to do aught good never will be our task, but ever to do ill our sole delight.”

In the case of another actor in this drama, we find further prima facie evidence of radical evil. The media industry — as soon as the Biden administration let it be known that a patent waiver was on the table — dispatched hordes of furious lobbyists to Washington to muddy the waters even further. Sure, it would be nice to save a few lives in India, Brazil and wherever else; but we could not risk the far greater evil of people manufacturing C3PO action figures without paying the proper licensing fees, or singing ‘Happy birthday’ unmolested by Warner Music’s lawyers.

Lest it be thought that we are overselling this cannibalistic reasoning, let us quote Chris Coons, the Democratic senator from Delaware. According to The Washington Post, Coons, “a close ally of Biden, has even invoked the January 6 storming of the Capitol among the reasons to protect patents, saying it revealed the need to unite the country.” The paper quotes Coons as saying:

“All of this is a wake-up call for us that we need to have another Sputnik-like moment of reinvestment in American innovation and competitiveness … A central part of being successful in this competition is continuing with our constitutionally created protected-property right of a patent.

The reference to Sputnik presumably made more sense in context — even Chris Coons must be aware that that was the Russians: we guess that he has in mind some bromide about America’s triumphs being borne from adversity. There is no Apollo without Sputnik.

His philosophy, then, makes a certain amount of logical sense: it is essentially a reformulation of the ideas of the philosopher, Leo Strauss, who was a major influence on the original neoconservatives, and very much the same sort of thing we are getting from Biden, who ominously sells his major policies as a question of ‘competition’ with China. If it is coherent, however, it is still a moral scandal: the logic is that Indians must pay for America’s national healing with their blood.

It is also straightforwardly absurd. Patents only make sense in the context of private industry; yet the very case Coons mentions as his model – the space race – had as its actors rival states, and only incidentally involved private companies as manufacturing contractors and so on. If Apollo 11 is the thing to emulate, then the sanctity of patents would be wholly incidental; if top NASA people had complained to John F Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson that patent litigation was interfering with the progress towards the moon landing, then we rather suspect that the offending patent would have been dispatched to oblivion with a flick of the presidential pen.

Artificial

The story of the Covid vaccines, meanwhile, illustrates the opposite of Coons’s point: far from being a ‘natural’ part of the patriotic furniture — a way to ensure reward for taking risks on research and development — the patent windfall demanded by Pfizer, Moderna and so forth is a strenuously artificial attempt to get paid twice for the same piece of work. Donald Trump’s administration, just like the Tory government in this country, ‘incentivized’ the production of vaccines — not by the promise of future profits, but by guaranteed payments, even for vaccines that did not in the end make the cut. The Trump administration ploughed $10 billion into the coffers of big pharma. Nobody who truly believed in the power of patent protections to incentivize production would have done so — after all, a successful vaccine would have no shortage of buyers. The scientific marvels undertaken by the researchers could only be done so quickly because some of the ideas involved had long been floating around, but somehow no pharma corporation had ever found the money to invest in them.

This is, in the end, because vaccines are not where the profit is in ‘normal’ times. This is best illustrated with another unconscionable crime of the pharmaceutical industry that began, likewise, with the manipulation of the patent system. Purdue, a smaller pharma outfit in the US, patented a new kind of slow-release painkiller, which was marketed as oxycodone. Thus began the notorious opioid addiction crisis. There are two reasons why this scheme made for such great business: the new patent gave them a monopoly; and it could be marketed as a means of long-term pain management, which meant a regular recurring income.

The trouble with vaccines is that, even for the flu, you only need one a year at most. There is also uncertainty about the long-term effectiveness of the Covid vaccines – hence the desperation to get as much money out of them as possible, while the going is good. For the pharma executives, as for the masses of Brazil, India and the whole global south, the clock is ticking. It has worked out well for the former so far, as is illustrated by the case of Pfizer, which pocketed a little under $2 billion from Trump. CEO Albert Bourla, the same day that he announced the success of the trial of his company’s vaccine, pocketed $5.6 million from selling Pfizer stock after the price bounced on the news, and his total pay for 2020 amounted to $21 million. This is the sort of windfall that rather tests one’s opposition to the death penalty.

We previously ‘explained’ all this by simply declaring the protagonists’ evil, but of course we cannot be satisfied with that. Bill Gates is the pertinent case —- what the hell is it to him if AstraZeneca gets to manufacture the vaccine exclusively or not? His own explanation — that making vaccines is very complicated and you need the expertise of a reliable firm – is risible, not because the premises are false, exactly, but because it flatly ignores the fact that the global south has plenty of manufacturing capacity for generic medicines already. Like the old-fashioned colonialist he is, he seems to have a stereotype of subsistence farmers boiling vaccines up in their shacks.

What is truly at issue is the principle of the thing — Coons, on that point, is right. Whatever Gates’s personal holdings in biotech and pharma companies, it is irrefutable that a large part of his personal wealth came from entering into monopolistic deals with computer hardware manufacturers and, by the same token, skillful manipulation of the patent-licensing system. Likewise, Disney and the other media corporations taking an interest only make money because they have the exclusive rights to recycle and imitate their ‘own’ dreck year in, year out — much of which is accumulated through endless mergers and acquisitions.

Once we have suspended patents in this one case, of course, the question is begged: why not in others? Stopping Covid is obviously necessary, and therefore obstructionism rightly appears as morally corrupt. But why, then, would we not also suspend patents in the fight against malaria (which has occupied so much of Gates’s time), or Aids, which claimed many more lives than necessary in sub-Saharan Africa because of big pharma rent-seeking in the 1990s and 2000s?

But then, if companies doing work of life-and-death importance have no moral right to intellectual property, why on earth is it acceptable to enforce such rights further up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs? What, really, is the injustice in people other than Disney being permitted to create Star wars content? (Especially given that most copyright profits, including Star wars, come merely from buying up and milking others’ ideas …)

Contradiction

There is an important contradiction involved here. As capitalism develops, and technology revolutionizes the forces of production, an increasingly important input into the productive process is information. The physical machines themselves, large and small, are commoditized. There is only so much innovation possible in the sewing machine, but we still need clothes and shoes, and so capitalist firms must compete to meet those needs. They do so in part by optimizing information – industrial technique, logistical organization and so on.

Yet unlike a physical machine or raw material, which cannot be duplicated without having your own machine-tool factory or your own mine, information is trivially copied. Instructions for the manufacture and storage of a vaccine will take up a few kilobytes of data: it is no more work for an internet-connected device to copy such a thing than it is to receive an SMS message or email. As the old techno-utopian slogan puts it, ‘Information wants to be free’. When something ‘wants’ to be free, making it unfree is reduced to a mere matter of force. It comes down to the intimidation of those who would copy — in the current context, via the World Trade Organization and other institutions of US imperial supremacy. By means of strenuous legal artifice, the achievements of scientific progress, of cultural ingenuity, are transformed into a source of monopolistic rents.

This is, in fact, true of ‘physical’ commodities too — but it is not so obvious, since scarcity looms larger over them, and thus it ‘makes sense,’ assuming we consider private property to be natural, that people should have legal recourse to defend ‘their stuff.’ The fundamental objection to that ‘common sense’ in fact predates Marxism — which is that a product is in fact the culmination of a great diversity of physical processes, of many acts of human labor and of nature too. Yet, outside of petty bourgeois enterprises, the people who profit thereby are precisely the people who do not contribute meaningfully; the people who have happened upon enough wealth to move the rest of us around like chess pieces. We are sure Pfizer’s biochemists are well-compensated, but not to the tune of $21 million.

Thus the classic phrase of Marx about the revolution: “the expropriation of the expropriators.” In other words, rent-seeking is not a distortion of capitalism, as bourgeois economists think, but a good enough image of its essence. Overthrowing capitalism involves taking back what was stolen from us. There is surely no more repellent example of such theft than the abandonment of billions of people to the whims of a deadly virus.

Originally published as “Rent-seeking as mass murder,” in Weekly Worker, May 6, 2021. Republished with permission.

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2021/0 ... ss-murder/

Well, the prez sez he is for 'relaxing' intellectual property rights on the vaccines. Unlike his previous persona the prez sez many of the right things. Sounds good, but I suspect as with other things 'the process' will reduce such promise to thin gruel and that is neither accidental or circumstantial, it is a good bet by a player who knows how things work, having been part of that process for decades. Thus capital is not offended, perhaps even enhanced, and all those hopeful fool progressives are kept in the corral and exhorted to elect more Dems. It is a cheap and endless shell game, three card monte for the naive.

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Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

Post by blindpig » Mon May 10, 2021 11:49 am

BIG PHARMA AGAINST THE RELEASE OF PATENTS FOR ANTICOVID VACCINES
May 8 , 2021 , 1:00 pm .

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Securing their markets in the Global North is more important for pharmaceutical companies than capacity building in emerging countries (Photo: Guillaume Souvant / AFP)

The European Union (EU) position on suspending intellectual property rights (IPRs) on coronavirus vaccines has relaxed somewhat since the Biden administration recently announced that it would support the motion at the World Trade Organization (WTO). ) while the pandemic lasts.

However, Brussels considers it counterproductive because "it could jeopardize the safety required for the production of drugs", a position shared by other large producers such as the United Kingdom and Switzerland.

In any case, it would not be a fluid process because in the WTO decisions are made by consensus of all its members (164) and Germany, the headquarters of BioNTech, one of the pharmaceutical companies that has developed a vaccine with Pfizer, is resisting the proposal.

A body called the EU Committee of Regions approved a resolution in which it advocates "exploring new solutions, such as the temporary suspension of patents" with a view to "increasing vaccine production." Although it is a non-binding text, it is the first European institution to make a statement in this regard.

The difference between the rate of distribution of anticovid vaccines in developed countries and that of the rest of the planet has been so wide that every week more countries are demanding urgent measures to accelerate immunization in countries with fewer resources.

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Possible vaccination coverage based on the number of doses purchased by countries, compared to their wealth and population, most low-income countries would not be able to vaccinate half their population (Photo: Swissinfo)

The WTO said in April that of the 700 million vaccines administered worldwide, only 0.2% had been in low-income countries. The recent rise in infections in India, the second most populous country in the world, has highlighted this issue.

BIG PHARMA IN A STATE OF DENIAL AND SHOCK
"Disappointing" called the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations (IFPMA) the position of the US government in a statement, which added that the measure " will not increase production dose."

"Quite the contrary, it can lead to disorganization," said the conglomerate, noting that other limitations to the production of doses must be solved "such as the elimination of trade barriers or bottlenecks in the supply of raw materials and other ingredients."

After the different governments of the Global North financed the research and development of drugs to minimize the effects of covid-19 on the population, the immense benefits that large pharmaceutical companies (or Big Pharma) obtain from your marketing.

The Pfizer company announced that it was revising its annual forecasts upwards and that it expected to earn 73% more than previously estimated, some 26 billion dollars for the commercialization of its vaccine developed together with the German BioNTech. So far this year the reports are of 3.4 billion dollars.

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Big Pharma, drug manufacturing companies, has made higher than expected profits so far this year due to the commercialization of anticovid vaccines (Photo: File)

An analysis by the kENUP Foundation revealed last January that the public sector spent at least 93 billion euros on vaccines and drugs against covid-19 in 2020, more than 95% of this amount went to vaccine manufacturers and the 5% of the funds were spent on drugs.

Pfizer Chief Executive Albert Bourla told The Wall Street Journal that there was no point in sharing the patents because, according to him, it would not involve increased production. The Pfizer official assured that the pharmaceutical company has been working for a year to increase manufacturing and reduce the gap between countries, and that a suspension of patents would discourage biotechnology companies from developing products in future pandemics.

El País mentions that "experts" have warned about the difficulties of releasing patents because Big Pharma has made enormous efforts to expand the production of vaccines to the maximum with agreements between them, the so-called voluntary licenses, and despite this they have not always achieved his objectives. He adds that the industry has warned that "bottlenecks in raw material supply chains may not go away and that the complexity of vaccine production means that it is not always possible to transfer knowledge."

The American transnational Johnson & Johnson, which has developed a vaccine (known as JNJ-78436735 or Ad26.COV2.S ) in collaboration with the Israel Deaconess Medical Center, ensures that of 100 candidates to partner for manufacturing, only 10 met the requirements.

However, countries such as India and South Africa have experience in mass production of these drugs and, at least for Sputnik V, researchers from the Gamaleya Institute (Russia) made use of the vaccine developed against the Ebola virus. So the development platform is not unprecedented and it is assumed that there were already projections about its mass manufacture before the pandemic.

Biden's announcement was greeted with sharp falls in the shares of pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and BioNTech, as well as Moderna and Novavax, on the Wall Street stock market.

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THE EU'S DILEMMA: PATENT LIBERATION OR INCREASED EXPORTS?
For its part, Germany, which hopes to launch another vaccine called CureVac soon, has indicated that giving up parts of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) would create "serious complications" in vaccine production, due to because the biggest constraints on production are not intellectual property, but increased capacity and quality assurance.

From Brussels, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, was willing to discuss the release of patents that grant companies a monopoly on the production of medicines, tests and technologies, although it seems more urgent than the producing countries allow dose export.

During a telematic intervention before the European University Institute in Florence, the official affirmed that Europe has combined its vaccination campaigns with the export of tens of millions of doses to other countries but provided figures from countries such as the United Kingdom (28 million) or Japan ( 72 million) adding that "Europe is right now the world's pharmacy and we are proud of it."

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The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, declared in the same week about the urgency that the producing countries allow the export of doses but also a strict control of the activity (Photo: John Thys / AP)

However, the tension between the EU and some countries or vaccine manufacturers is known. On April 30 it was announced that the British company AstraZeneca would not be able to comply with the vaccine delivery schedule foreseen for the 27 EU countries, to which the European Commission responded by imposing strict controls on their exports on all pharmaceutical laboratories. .

On the other hand, the EU has raised almost 16 billion euros through a financial aid initiative to third countries (Coronavirus Global Response, "Global Response to Coronavirus" in English), in addition to supporting the donation of doses through Covax, the global initiative sponsored by the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF to supply vaccines to countries with fewer resources.

Von der Leyen affirms that the supranational entity has agreed to give up part of the remainder of the vials it has acquired, has kept export channels open and has allowed the output of as many doses as have been distributed among the Member States, however it has urged to the creation of a transparency mechanism in exports so that it can be implemented "as soon as possible."

Meanwhile the United States has concentrated on vaccinating its own citizens and has prevented the release of doses, even invoking emergency regulations applied in times of war. As its vaccination campaign has already reached an accelerated pace and the first dose has already been administered to more than 50% of the population, the Biden administration is willing to export part of its available remnants (in particular the AstraZeneca doses that are not available). has come to authorize) and to address within the WTO the release of patents.

This would free the option for countries to allow other manufacturers to produce and export vaccines to other countries without legal risk.

REAL AND INDUCED BOTTLENECKS
Von der Leyen has highlighted the pace of the vaccination campaign in Europe, 3 million citizens per day, saying that "it is a success". So far about 200 million doses have been distributed in the EU, claiming that "neither China nor Russia are coming close."

Their insistence on increasing the production and export of vaccines goes through more than one "bottleneck" ranging from the same technological matrix that is used for adenovirus-based vaccines such as AstraZeneca, Sputnik V or Johnson & Johnson.

Mass production consists of growing, in containers called bioreactors, cell cultures capable of acting as hosts for attenuated or inactivated versions of the virus against which protection is sought; they can be active viruses of a different and less dangerous type that carry one or two genes extracted from the target virus, even just isolated target virus proteins. The idea is that the vaccine introduces into the body (or induces it to produce) something that the immune system learns to recognize and attack if the true target virus appears.

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Although it was known for a year that there would not be enough supply to meet the demand for vaccines, Big Pharma and the EU refuse to do things differently and prevent monopolies from appropriating knowledge (Photo: File)

Maximizing the performance of a bioreactor is both an art and a science, especially since the health of the cells involved (raw material) and the environmental conditions of the manufacturing site are important. AstraZeneca has not been able to meet its own production targets because it is predicting when the proper biological balance will be found. The company claims that it takes six to nine months to get a production facility up and running from scratch, and that even that schedule is only possible by working with experienced partners and at a fast pace. Currently, it works with 25 organizations that manufacture the vaccine in 15 countries.

However, given the declaration of a pandemic and in the process of research and development of vaccines, Big Pharma focused more on securing its markets in the Global North than on building capacities in emerging countries that already have infrastructure for mass manufacturing of vaccines.

These companies, according to Marc Vandepitte , have little interest in rapidly and massively increasing their own production capacity, because if they expanded their capacity to supply the whole world in six months, the newly built facilities would be empty immediately after when the curves of infections and deaths. This would mean a much smaller benefit compared to current forecasts, in which existing factories will produce for years at their current capacity.

Gaétan de Rassenfosse, professor of innovation policy and intellectual property at the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne (EPFL, Switzerland), stated that "IP holders have limited production capacity and many companies around the world, including countries in development, they are capable of producing drugs, vaccines and medical devices. Therefore, giving up intellectual property would certainly greatly increase the availability of these products. "

Their argument is backed by a recent Associated Press investigation , which found factories on three continents that have unused capacity and could produce vaccines if they had the blueprint and the technical know-how.

The biggest bottleneck has been shown to be the need for Big Pharma and entities like the EU to maintain technological supremacy, this time in the production of vaccines, as is also demonstrated by the fact that 100 lobbyists from pharmaceutical laboratories work without rest so that vaccines do not reach poor countries.

Last Friday, April 23, an investigation by The Intercept was published describing the deployment of these operators in Washington to avoid patent release measures. The report, signed by Lee Fang, gives the name of former congressman Mike McKay, currently an employee of Pfizer or Elissa Alben, also at Pfizer and previously staff of the International Trade Council.

THE QUESTION REMAINS: VACCINES FOR EVERYONE?
South Africa and India, which today exceed 190,000 and 54,000 deaths from covid respectively, proposed the exemption last October arguing that the releases would avoid barriers to timely access to affordable medical products, including vaccines and drugs, or the increase in research, development, manufacture and supply of essential drugs and products.

Although no vaccines had been approved at that time, they had already expressed concern about meeting the demand, backed by the World Health Organization (WHO) and 100 other countries, to ensure that vaccines reached the whole of humanity as soon as possible .

According to information from The Intercept , the laboratories operate through large Washington lobbies such as the US Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable and the International Intellectual Property Alliance. Republicans and Democrats alike have opposed the patent release proposal and organizations like Global Justice Now! They have echoed such information to request "vaccines for people" after recalling, through their spokesperson Heidi Chow, that:

"The public does not want Big Pharma to have a monopoly on vaccines that were developed largely with public money. These vaccines are a global public good that should be available to everyone, everywhere. This is obvious to the public in all the G7 nations, but political leaders are burying their heads in the sand as people around them die. "

In an opinion piece published in The Guardian , science popularizer Stephen Buranyi estimated that around 430 million doses have been produced since January for about 215 million people and that, of the doses already administered, "about half went to the richest 16% of the world's population. "

Without a change in the trend in terms of patents, it is estimated that 85 countries in the South will not be able to start mass vaccination until at least 2023. Among them are most of the African countries, Bolivia, Paraguay and Venezuela in Latin America and Pakistan or Afghanistan in Asia.

Europe insists that the distribution of vaccines will come more efficiently if it is done through voluntary donations and not through technology transfer to countries that have the capacities to manufacture, distribute and export to their most needy neighbors. We will see if, as in other cases, it bends to what the United States determines.

https://misionverdad.com/globalistan/bi ... -anticovid

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Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

Post by blindpig » Fri May 21, 2021 1:12 pm

Nine People Became Billionaires From COVID-19 Vaccine Industry

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Nine new billionaires have been created through the production, distribution and sale of COVID-19 vaccines, NGOs say. | Photo: Twitter/@marciojmsilva

Published 20 May 2021 (15 hours 56 minutes ago)

Topping that list are the CEOs of Moderna and BioNTech, both of whom have amassed wealth in excess of $4 billion.


At least nine people have become billionaires since the global COVID-19 pandemic began thanks to the profits they made from the manufacture, sale and distribution of vaccines against the disease, says the Vaccine Alliance for the People, a group that advocates for equal access to these drugs.

This list is headed by the CEOs of Moderna and BioNTech, Stéphane Bancel and Ugur Sahin, who have reportedly reaped wealth in excess of 4 billion dollars, according to Forbes magazine.

In addition, this group includes three Moderna investors, the president of a company contracted to manufacture and package its vaccine and the three co-founders of the Chinese pharmaceutical company CanSino Biologics.

Eight other people linked to this sector who were already billionaires before the pandemic also increased their wealth significantly: members of the Chinese companies Chongqing Zhifei Biological and Sinopharm or the Indian firm Cadila Healthcare and shareholders of the German BioNTech.

The nine new billionaires have a combined net wealth of $19.3 billion, enough to fully vaccinate 1.3 times the entire population of low-income countries.

The Vaccine for the People Alliance underscores "the enormous wealth being generated for a handful of people by vaccines" because, despite the fact that these drugs were "largely publicly funded," private companies with monopolies on their intellectual property are reaping the rewards.


"That situation is unfair and must change," say these activists on the eve of the G20 global health summit, to be held this May 21. "The nine new billionaires have a combined net wealth of $19.3 billion, enough to fully vaccinate 1.3 times the entire population of low-income countries," which "have only received 0.2% of the global vaccine supply due to the huge shortfall of available doses, despite being home to 10% of the world's population."

Winnie Byanyima, executive director of the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS, said, "It is obscene that profits continue to be more important than saving lives."

For their part, vaccine manufacturers and influential supporters of intellectual property protection for medicines, such as Bill Gates of the United States, say that factors such as a shortage of adequate production capacity in developing countries and other logistical difficulties are holding back global progress in vaccination and believe that lifting patent protections will not solve that; in fact, it could slow the process even further.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Nin ... -0021.html

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Profiteers in times of general distress are usually treated harshly, justifiably so.

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Re: Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

Post by blindpig » Wed May 26, 2021 1:43 pm

Chinese state media is turning on Fauci amid Wuhan lab controversy

Hong Kong (CNN)After weeks of facing fierce attacks from Republicans, top US infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci now has a new critic: Chinese state media.

"US elites degenerate further in morality, and Fauci is one of them," was the headline of a blistering opinion piece penned by Hu Xijin, editor-in-chief of the state-run Global Times this week.
In the article Hu accused the top US infectious disease expert of "fanning a huge lie against China" by hyping the theory that the coronavirus was leaked from a Wuhan lab. Another article in the Global Times declared that Fauci had "betrayed Chinese scientists."
The anger is centered on Fauci's remarks this month that he is no longer convinced the Covid-19 pandemic originated naturally.
"I think we should continue to investigate what went on in China until we continue to find out to the best of our ability what happened," said the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at a fact-checking symposium on May 11.
The comments appear to be a shift from Fauci's earlier view that the disease likely was the result of animal to human transmission.
Fauci's comments were followed by a Wall Street Journal exclusive, citing a US intelligence report, that said three researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in November 2019 that they sought hospital care — a revelation that, if true, could add weight to growing calls for further investigation into whether the coronavirus may have escaped from the Chinese lab.

<snip>

Fauci has since attempted to clarify his remarks. On Tuesday, he told CBS News correspondent Weijia Jiang that his opinion about the origins of Covid-19 have not changed and still believes that its origin in nature is "highly likely."
"Since no one is 100% sure, he's open to a thorough investigation. Dr. Fauci said that does not mean he believes the virus first emerged in a lab, as some have suggested," Jiang wrote on Twitter.

https://us.cnn.com/2021/05/26/china/chi ... index.html

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The offending piece:
US elites degenerate further in morality, and Fauci is one of them
By Hu Xijin
Published: May 25, 2021 11:58 PM

Because of their anti-China stance, US elites have festered further in morality. Even figures like Dr. Anthony Fauci, a top expert in public health, have echoed their opinion war against China. Fauci said that he is no longer convinced that the COVID-19 pandemic originated naturally. He added, "I think we should continue to investigate what went on in China until we continue to find out to the best of our ability what happened," according to media reports. Fauci attempted to hype the old and groundless narrative that the virus was leaked from a lab in Wuhan. It is noticeable that a day before Fauci made the statement, the Wall Street Journal published a so-called "exclusive report." It said "Three researchers from China's Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in November 2019 that they sought hospital care." It also reported that several researchers at the lab became sick in autumn 2019 "with symptoms consistent with both Covid-19 and common seasonal illness." This is a blatant lie, a conspiracy created by US intelligence agencies and the media outlet to slander China, and China has denied it. Is it a coincidence that Fauci repeated such lines?

In general, US elites are increasingly betraying their conscience. Fauci says ambiguously, but he knows he is fanning a huge lie against China. Rumors and slander against China can be seen everywhere in the US media, and politicians lie about China without any bottom line. They argue that the WHO cannot be trusted, let alone the scientists and doctors who have made great achievements in China's fight against the epidemic. And they themselves have become "judges" of the truth.

In terms of expertise and influence, American experts such as Fauci can hardly match Chinese top experts. First, among American experts, there is no expert like Zhong Nanshan who can give a decisive assessment of the country's epidemic situation. American experts are weaker than their Chinese counterparts in understanding the epidemic and influencing the anti-virus fight.

Second, American experts have shown more interest in participating in political and ideological struggles than Chinese scientists. They have promoted politicizing the epidemic through actions such as talking to media and collective signature. Their professional level and attention are not as good as that of Chinese scientists.

The world has really changed. Many people and things of the US that we saw as examples in the past have been gradually losing their halo, with their real mediocre quality being exposed. To be honest, I wish they can continue to be examples, but they failed to perform up to standard. Their moral and professional standards do not match their reputation.

The author is editor-in-chief of the Global Times. opinion@globaltimes.com.cn

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202105/1224480.shtml
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US hits a new low in demonizing China on vaccines, climate change
By Chen Weihua | China Daily | Updated: 2021-05-21 07:20

It's no secret that American leaders are obsessed with demonizing China, but slandering China for its role in global issues such as the fight against climate change and COVID-19 betrays the United States' promise to strengthen multilateral cooperation and instead undermine global solidarity.

Unfortunately, US President Joe Biden did that again when he announced on Monday that Washington will share another 20 million novel coronavirus vaccine doses in addition to the 60 million AstraZeneca doses it had pledged earlier.

It was good to see the Biden administration finally deciding to halt its vaccine nationalism in the face of growing pressure at home and abroad. Biden's announcement came days after World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus made a fresh appeal to rich nations to share the vaccines with poorer countries so they could vaccinate their healthcare workers and vulnerable groups before vaccinating children and others.

Yet Biden sounded virulent when he said that the US has pledged to share a substantially higher number of doses with other countries than Russia or China. He added that "there's a lot of talk about Russia and China influencing the world with vaccines" and "we want to lead the world with our values", stressing that "democracy will lead the world out of this pandemic".

By making such a statement, Biden showed that he is no different from his predecessor Donald Trump in practising the "America first" vaccine policy as well as politicizing the pandemic response.

Worse, his claim is factually incorrect. According to an early May report by Airfinity, a life science intelligence firm, China has shipped about 240 million doses overseas, more than all other countries combined, and has committed to providing another 500 million.

In fact, the US is also far behind Russia, India and the European Union in vaccine exports. The WHO has long warned against politicizing the pandemic response, saying the virus knows no ideology or political system, and yet Biden continues to do exactly that.

Biden is wrong on another count, because many so-called democratic countries have fared poorly in terms of COVID-19 response, with the US leading the world in the number of cases and deaths.

If Biden means what he said when he claimed the US will not "use our vaccines to secure favors from other countries", the US should distribute some doses to Cuba, Iran, Venezuela and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, and immediately lift sanctions that have severely hampered the pandemic response in these countries.

The sad truth is that many in India, where the outbreak is still raging, are still wondering why the US has not shipped any vaccines to their country despite the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention saying that there are more than 27 million unused Moderna vaccine doses and 35 million Pfizer BioNTech doses in the US.

On Tuesday, Biden toured a Ford electric car center in Michigan to sell his $2-trillion-plus infrastructure plan, which is being opposed by most Republican and some Democrat lawmakers, and said that "right now, China is leading in this (electric vehicle) race" but "well, I got news for them: They will not win this race. We can't let them".

The fact that China has invested heavily in electric vehicles and renewable energy, and is the leader in these fields has been widely applauded as a good example of how to fight climate change. But the Biden administration has shown its true colors, by revealing its China-containment strategy, even when tackling global challenges like climate change.

The Barack Obama administration, with Biden as the US vice-president, warmly applauded the close Sino-US cooperation in the fight against the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, climate change and nuclear non-proliferation. But the Biden administration has shown its real face by trying to undermine global cooperation in the fight against common challenges.

The author is chief of China Daily EU Bureau based in Brussels.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20210 ... c0658.html

Unlike every liberal in Western Civilization I never trusted the sumbitch. Yes, given that administration his position might have been filled by worse, and indeed he was supplanted by a total charlatan for a while. But Fauci hung on and lent badly needed respectability to the Trump Covid shitshow. Yeah, his presence might have prevented worse but I dunno, half million dead? Had he called out the administration's reluctant and cack-handed pandemic response perhaps things might have been different, especially in regards to mask wearing in those critical times(and continuing into today). Certainly he shares some blame. Political cowardice is a hallmark of the career bureaucrat.

Concerning Fauci's most recent antics, too typical. First, the 'explosive' headlines with tenuous relation to context, then the 'clarification' after the propaganda cat is out of the bag and loose in the collective imagination. We see stunts like this on almost a daily basis nowadays as the bosses refine their techniques of manipulation. The headline is everything, follow-up an afterthought. Whadda tool.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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