Biden’s Doing the Right Thing On Vaccines — But Why Did It Take So Long?
Extraordinary Times Call For Extraordinary Leadership
In case you haven’t heard the Biden Administration changed its mind on perhaps the most pressing issue in the world right now: vaccine patents. In the beginning, Joe Biden said he wouldn’t back vaccine patents — that was before there were vaccines. But after that…his administration did. It blocked attempts to open source vaccines — along with Canada and Europe — at the WTO.
As a result, a dire situation has unfolded. The world now has a shortage of vaccines — because drugmakers were allowed to privatise them. Vaccines — all of them — were developed as public goods, with public money, at public institutions. And yet Big Pharma was allowed — encouraged, in fact — to come along and sign exclusive licenses…for a song. It’s a grim and gruesome and shocking story, to anyone with a working mind or soul, because, well, public goods are for everyone. In this case, everyone in the world, even if they’re developed in rich countries, because even rich countries are better off when the whole world is vaccinated, since there are less variants.
That, though, is the world we want to get to. In the one we live in, Covid is reaching apocalyptic proportions in countries from India to Peru — precisely…
