Trump gave Moderna all the patent-waivers it needed to make a vaccine

And then Moderna fought against patent-waivers for that vaccine.

There’s a lot of competition for the title of “Most On-The-Nose Symbol of Late Stage Capitalism,” but I think there’s a strong case for awarding the crown to “Vaccine Apartheid” — the decision to deny covid vaccines to billions of poor people in the Global South.

Here’s how that went down: countries in the poor world were arm-twisted into signing the WTO agreement on pain of being shut out of global trade (these former colonies had all been forcibly converted to export crop economies that relied on rich-world countries for seed and Big Ag tech, so opting out of trade wasn’t an option).

Part of the WTO is the TRIPS (AKA “Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights”) — a treaty that binds WTO members to respect each others’ patent rights. This is an inarguably bad deal for poor countries, which is why the USA didn’t respect foreign patents until they became a net patent exporter.

One way this can go horribly wrong? Pharmaceuticals. The marginal costs of producing most drugs are very low, but Big Pharma wants to charge all the traffic can bear — markups of tens of thousands of percent! They say this is to recoup R&D, but R&D…