I have been thinking about how to respond to this article for the last 24 hours and haven't been sure what to say so I am going to take a different strategy which is to suggest what I think I "will" happen and why.
What I think will happen is Biden will do the bare minimum he can to avoid looking completely ghoulish and blame everything on Trump and Trumpism. Why is he going to do that? Well that is what all the political incentives in our current political system are(not just in the US but in Claire's France and Owen's Canada too). How many people who voted Biden last time are going to vote Trump in 2024 in a Trump vs Biden re-match? Or more specifically how many Cosmopolitan Globalists will vote Trump next time? Not many even if Biden only does a "fair" job of rolling out the vaccine? True I can imagine there will be one or two prominent Biden supporters who might go Trump next time that the media will make hay about but the political boundary lines fairly or unfairly have already been drawn. Again all of this is amoral and ghoulish to boot but if you are actually asking me what I think WILL happen this is it and largely due to are present societies political incentives.
The second issue that I hope will be explored in Part IV is I think anti-vax sentiment is very real and has a large degree of overlap with support for Trump and Trumpism. So Biden has to either convince a part of the population who thinks he is illegitimate to take the vaccines or use the full force of state power to make them. Again I wouldn't get my hopes up too high on this front
Again sorry to be such a pessimist but this is unfortunately where I see this going. I will also point out this is not the first time a US President has used inaction as a means to sandbag his political opponents. Franklin Roosevelt did this all the time and did it in part to get the US into World War Two which nowadays is considered a good and necessary thing.
Congratulations on an excellent article. There are many good suggestions in this installment of the series just as there were in the previous installments. Sadly, it is a virtual certainty that few if any of the suggestions itemized by the Cosmopolitan Globalists will ever be enacted. It’s a shame really, because if the Cosmopolitan Globalists were running the FDA and EMA, the pandemic might actually be brought under control.
The people actually calling the shots, the government bureaucrats and their allies in the academic community who sit on the powerful advisory boards of the regulatory agencies, true to form, are behaving like little more than languid sybarites.
They feel far more allegiance to the bureaucratic norms (which don’t work that well even in normal times) than they do to solving the biggest global emergency since the Second World War. The bureaucrats who’ve risen through the ranks into senior decision-making positions have gotten where they are by worshipping at the altar of a sclerotic approval process, not smashing that altar to smithereens.
There’s an irony here that Claire Berlinski in particular will, I suspect, hesitate to acknowledge. She wants President Biden to take charge, bypass the bureaucratic nonsense and lead the world out of the crisis. Does that sound like President Biden to anyone who has paid attention to his career?
President Biden as well as his entire political party (along with most members of the GOP) has spent decades accreting that bureaucracy. It’s as massive and inefficient as it is because that’s what Democrats have encouraged in every election since World War II. That’s also what cosmopolitans and globalists have encouraged; it’s part and parcel of their ideology. As for the EU; it’s even worse.
Call it the administrative state or the deep state; the label doesn’t matter. What matters is that it is ill-suited to address the current crisis and the idea that Joe Biden, a man with deep reverence for this bureaucracy would walk away from doesn’t pass the smell test.
There was one person who might have told the bureaucrats at the FDA and CDC (and to a lesser extent the NIH) to take a flying you know what; his name was Donald Trump. No one can be sure of what Trump would have done and he surely wouldn’t have tried to lead the world out of the crisis. But he would have been far more likely to overrule the bureaucrats (who he couldn’t stand) than Biden is. Perhaps this might have helped lead the United States out of the pandemic and set a good example for the rest of the world. Even those with Trump Derangement Syndrome should, if they are honest, admit that Operation Warp Speed (championed by Trump) was the most successful American endeavor since the Apollo Mission. Of course, had Trump been re-elected and if he had followed the recommendations outlined in this essay to a tee, the bureaucrats, the academic community, the press and Democratic politicians would have accused him of being anti-science. In fact, our hosts, the Cosmopolitan Globalists would probably have accused him of being anti-science. The real problem is that making bureaucrats and academics the sole arbiters of what scientific fact is, insures that the prejudices and bigotries of those communities sets the final agenda. Call it by it’s real name; the autocracy of the “experts.”
Unless I missed it, one issue the article didn’t address in depth is the durability of protection offered by the various vaccines. If the durability of protection is short or the vaccines need to be tweaked for new variants, it may be necessary to inoculate people periodically, perhaps yearly. Over years or decades (until the patents of the vaccines expire-which is continuously extended if vaccines are adjusted to protect from new variants) the companies will make lots of money. $6 billion to compensate the companies for appropriating their IP doesn’t even come close.
There’s another reason that fair compensation for the IP attributable to the vaccine will need to be far greater than the author anticipates. The valuable IP is not in the genetic coding for spike protein; it’s in the vector. In a certain way, the companies see the Covid vaccines as a loss leader. Whether it’s the polyethylene glycol for the Moderna vaccine and the Pfizer vaccine or the various adenoviruses used by Janssen and AstraZeneca, it’s the delivery devices for the antigen that matter.
These companies all see the possibility of replacing all vaccines currently available (dead and attenuated virus vaccines) with this new technology. Lots of money to be made there. Then there’s the annual flu vaccine and the potential possibility of a universal flu vaccine. If one or more of these technologies could be harnessed to an antigen that provided universal protection from flu, that alone would be worth far more than $6 billion.
Then there’s the grand prize; it’s what Pfizer, Moderna and many others were working on long before Covid came along; the possibility of vaccines against various forms of cancer. That’s why the mRNA vaccines we’re fortuitously ready to role when Covid came along; companies were perfecting the technologies to immunize against cancer. Asking these companies to forgo IP for Covid or to accept compensation far less than a cancer vaccine would be worth is a sure fire was to stop biomedical innovation dead in its tracks.
I have been thinking about how to respond to this article for the last 24 hours and haven't been sure what to say so I am going to take a different strategy which is to suggest what I think I "will" happen and why.
What I think will happen is Biden will do the bare minimum he can to avoid looking completely ghoulish and blame everything on Trump and Trumpism. Why is he going to do that? Well that is what all the political incentives in our current political system are(not just in the US but in Claire's France and Owen's Canada too). How many people who voted Biden last time are going to vote Trump in 2024 in a Trump vs Biden re-match? Or more specifically how many Cosmopolitan Globalists will vote Trump next time? Not many even if Biden only does a "fair" job of rolling out the vaccine? True I can imagine there will be one or two prominent Biden supporters who might go Trump next time that the media will make hay about but the political boundary lines fairly or unfairly have already been drawn. Again all of this is amoral and ghoulish to boot but if you are actually asking me what I think WILL happen this is it and largely due to are present societies political incentives.
The second issue that I hope will be explored in Part IV is I think anti-vax sentiment is very real and has a large degree of overlap with support for Trump and Trumpism. So Biden has to either convince a part of the population who thinks he is illegitimate to take the vaccines or use the full force of state power to make them. Again I wouldn't get my hopes up too high on this front
Again sorry to be such a pessimist but this is unfortunately where I see this going. I will also point out this is not the first time a US President has used inaction as a means to sandbag his political opponents. Franklin Roosevelt did this all the time and did it in part to get the US into World War Two which nowadays is considered a good and necessary thing.
I'm chomping at the bit for the final installments already.
Congratulations on an excellent article. There are many good suggestions in this installment of the series just as there were in the previous installments. Sadly, it is a virtual certainty that few if any of the suggestions itemized by the Cosmopolitan Globalists will ever be enacted. It’s a shame really, because if the Cosmopolitan Globalists were running the FDA and EMA, the pandemic might actually be brought under control.
The people actually calling the shots, the government bureaucrats and their allies in the academic community who sit on the powerful advisory boards of the regulatory agencies, true to form, are behaving like little more than languid sybarites.
They feel far more allegiance to the bureaucratic norms (which don’t work that well even in normal times) than they do to solving the biggest global emergency since the Second World War. The bureaucrats who’ve risen through the ranks into senior decision-making positions have gotten where they are by worshipping at the altar of a sclerotic approval process, not smashing that altar to smithereens.
There’s an irony here that Claire Berlinski in particular will, I suspect, hesitate to acknowledge. She wants President Biden to take charge, bypass the bureaucratic nonsense and lead the world out of the crisis. Does that sound like President Biden to anyone who has paid attention to his career?
President Biden as well as his entire political party (along with most members of the GOP) has spent decades accreting that bureaucracy. It’s as massive and inefficient as it is because that’s what Democrats have encouraged in every election since World War II. That’s also what cosmopolitans and globalists have encouraged; it’s part and parcel of their ideology. As for the EU; it’s even worse.
Call it the administrative state or the deep state; the label doesn’t matter. What matters is that it is ill-suited to address the current crisis and the idea that Joe Biden, a man with deep reverence for this bureaucracy would walk away from doesn’t pass the smell test.
There was one person who might have told the bureaucrats at the FDA and CDC (and to a lesser extent the NIH) to take a flying you know what; his name was Donald Trump. No one can be sure of what Trump would have done and he surely wouldn’t have tried to lead the world out of the crisis. But he would have been far more likely to overrule the bureaucrats (who he couldn’t stand) than Biden is. Perhaps this might have helped lead the United States out of the pandemic and set a good example for the rest of the world. Even those with Trump Derangement Syndrome should, if they are honest, admit that Operation Warp Speed (championed by Trump) was the most successful American endeavor since the Apollo Mission. Of course, had Trump been re-elected and if he had followed the recommendations outlined in this essay to a tee, the bureaucrats, the academic community, the press and Democratic politicians would have accused him of being anti-science. In fact, our hosts, the Cosmopolitan Globalists would probably have accused him of being anti-science. The real problem is that making bureaucrats and academics the sole arbiters of what scientific fact is, insures that the prejudices and bigotries of those communities sets the final agenda. Call it by it’s real name; the autocracy of the “experts.”
Unless I missed it, one issue the article didn’t address in depth is the durability of protection offered by the various vaccines. If the durability of protection is short or the vaccines need to be tweaked for new variants, it may be necessary to inoculate people periodically, perhaps yearly. Over years or decades (until the patents of the vaccines expire-which is continuously extended if vaccines are adjusted to protect from new variants) the companies will make lots of money. $6 billion to compensate the companies for appropriating their IP doesn’t even come close.
There’s another reason that fair compensation for the IP attributable to the vaccine will need to be far greater than the author anticipates. The valuable IP is not in the genetic coding for spike protein; it’s in the vector. In a certain way, the companies see the Covid vaccines as a loss leader. Whether it’s the polyethylene glycol for the Moderna vaccine and the Pfizer vaccine or the various adenoviruses used by Janssen and AstraZeneca, it’s the delivery devices for the antigen that matter.
These companies all see the possibility of replacing all vaccines currently available (dead and attenuated virus vaccines) with this new technology. Lots of money to be made there. Then there’s the annual flu vaccine and the potential possibility of a universal flu vaccine. If one or more of these technologies could be harnessed to an antigen that provided universal protection from flu, that alone would be worth far more than $6 billion.
Then there’s the grand prize; it’s what Pfizer, Moderna and many others were working on long before Covid came along; the possibility of vaccines against various forms of cancer. That’s why the mRNA vaccines we’re fortuitously ready to role when Covid came along; companies were perfecting the technologies to immunize against cancer. Asking these companies to forgo IP for Covid or to accept compensation far less than a cancer vaccine would be worth is a sure fire was to stop biomedical innovation dead in its tracks.