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Cory Doctorow

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%.

doctorow.medium.com/pandemic-o

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The Earth, floating in space, being attacked by a Luna-scale covid molecule bearing the Pfizer logo, which is irradiating the southern hemisphere with a beam weapon that has set the Global South on fire.
4 comments
Cory Doctorow

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.

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Cory Doctorow

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.

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Cory Doctorow

The latest delaying tactic? Insisting that any WTO vaccine waiver should exclude trade secrets - the know-how necessary to turn patents and scientific papers into vaccine production:

osborneclarke.com/insights/tra

It's a maneuver only an IP lawyer could love.

It takes a lot of work to make an issue as clear-cut and urgent as vaccine equity into a controversy. Karan Menon manages to lay out the whole case in 95 seconds in a Tiktok video:

twitter.com/TheKaranMenon/stat

4/

The latest delaying tactic? Insisting that any WTO vaccine waiver should exclude trade secrets - the know-how necessary to turn patents and scientific papers into vaccine production:

osborneclarke.com/insights/tra

It's a maneuver only an IP lawyer could love.

Dr. Quadragon ❌

@pluralistic
I agree. Vaccines are essential and we should be as open as possible about the information necessary to produce them.

It never should be about "competition". It is not a game.

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