IP lawyers weaponize trade secrecy to stall vaccine waivers

But Karan Menon has their number.

The world is experiencing a “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” but the largest pool unvaccinated people isn’t to be found among vaccine deniers of the rich world.

Rather, these vulnerable people — whose infections might spawn new, vaccine-bypassing, more-lethal variants — are the 2.5b people in the world’s 125 poorest countries, where vaccines are not widely available and the vaccination rate is 2.6%.

https://doctorow.medium.com/pandemic-of-the-unvaccinated-5844d6c37c9b

The pharma lobbyists who have blocked a WTO waiver are the true vaccine deniers. They are literally denying vaccines to billions of people, but also implicitly denying that constitutes an existential risk to all of us, as unvaccinated nations offer fertile breeding grounds for new, scarier variants.

Big Pharma — and its shills, like Howard Dean — has based this vaccine denial on two big lies:

I. That vaccine factories take too long to build to be of use. Moderna privately admits that new factories could have been built in 3–4 months.

II. That poor brown people are too primitive to make their own vaccines. The world’s largest vaccine factories are in the Global South.