CR: COVID-19 --Political Talk

[Captainant 28,536]

Just now, Johnny Sack said:

It's wonderful for all those hourly employees and small businesses that have been fucked.  Because they own lots of stock.

man, just imagine how shitty it would be if all of the COVID relief for small businesses were gobbled up by businesses just to give bonuses to their boards and buyback stocks then. It really would be shitty policy if there were no contingencies or mandates, or oversight on how the funds would be used. 

I'm glad to hear that you're finally thinking about all those hourly wage earners, it's a major change of heart for you!

1 minute ago, VelvetFreeze said:

stock market won't be the focus point of the economic depression on the horizon.

No shit. We've been riding a big ass bubble for the last couple of years. We even blew our economic stimulus wad at a time when markets were already red hot for some cockamamie reason

[AggieFactFinder 31]

19 minutes ago, Lobo said:

I know the House and Senate opposed him.  I'm talking about the fact that he had some support from the general public on it.  Same kind of people who think "No vaccine for my kid, don't trust it" were gonna go all in for Perry's HPV.  Ironic thing is both Covid-19 and HPV can be prevented by wearing masks.  

Nobody who actually remembered how much resistance he got from his own party would've used that incident to try make your point.  I seriously doubt any any Texas governor's executive order has been so roundly rejected by his own party.  I would love to see evidence of one if you've got it.  

[Dahobbs 18,318]

23 minutes ago, Captainant said:

sack from the top rope with an unattributed and unsourced chart comparing relative numbers! 

 

11 minutes ago, Johnny Sack said:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9543237/Dem-states-lost-jobs-double-rate-Republican-ones-pandemic.html

 

Here is your source.

I actually looked to try and understand exactly where they got their data and what they were actually comparing. It isn't very clear to me. 

Here is data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Texas (and other states in the link): 

https://www.bls.gov/eag/eag.tx.htm

You can click on the back data button to get information from farther back. If someone can tell what two numbers they are comparing to get -4.1% for Texas, I'd love to know. It isn't based on employment rate, which went from  3.7 in February 2020 to 6.9 in December 2020. And it isn't total number of employed despite what the chart says, from 13,662,942 to 13,162,510 over the same period.  So, I really don't understand what value is being shown in the chart.  Further, the value for states like Idaho in the chart makes no sense. There was definitely significant job loss there. 

Edited May 6, 2021 by Dahobbs

[tantric superman 4,668]

23 hours ago, cactusflinthead said:

 

Seems like the one thing in the world we should be protecting, and indeed, giving a double secret bonus to.

[Longhorn_Fan68 34,104]

3 minutes ago, tantric superman said:

Seems like the one thing in the world we should be protecting, and indeed, giving a double secret bonus to.

huh?

[Judge Roybeanbag 11,860]

52 minutes ago, Johnny Sack said:

You can't lose what you never had.  

Edited May 6, 2021 by Judge Roybeanbag

[tantric superman 4,668]

24 minutes ago, Longhorn_Fan68 said:

huh?

Exactly.  Why would we support any lessening of intellectual property rights for the companies that got us the vaccines so quickly?

[wildcat09 29,579]

44 minutes ago, Johnny Sack said:

It's wonderful for all those hourly employees and small businesses that have been fucked.  Because they own lots of stock.

And no, I barely even look at my tax deferred retirement accounts.  They are not material to me.

I'm sure all those hourly employees at meat packing plants that died are really grateful that they were forced back to work. 

[Longhorn_Fan68 34,104]

16 minutes ago, tantric superman said:

Exactly.  Why would we support any lessening of intellectual property rights for the companies that got us the vaccines so quickly?

um, because it's in our national interest.  because if we don't get this virus under control at home and abroad we will never get back to normal. because it's the right fucking thing to do. the gov't helped fund and produce the vaccines. I think private pharma should be compelled to share it. if they came up with it 100% on their own, then I would agree with you. but they didn't. not even close.

[Johnny Sack 8,397]

13 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

I'm sure all those hourly employees at meat packing plants that died are really grateful that they were forced back to work. 

Forced?  

[Johnny Sack 8,397]

34 minutes ago, Judge Roybeanbag said:

You can't lose what you never had.  

With all that GDP California has the 5th worse unemployment rate in the United States.  NY is second worst.

https://www.bls.gov/web/laus/laumstrk.htm 

Edited May 6, 2021 by Johnny Sack

[tantric superman 4,668]

1 minute ago, Longhorn_Fan68 said:

um, because it's in our national interest.  because if we don't get this virus under control at home and abroad we will never get back to normal. because it's the right fucking thing to do. the gov't helped fund and produce the vaccines. I think private pharma should be compelled to share it. if they came up with it 100% on their own, then I would agree with you. but they didn't. not even close.

Explain to me how pharma didn't develop the intellectual property we are asking them to waive.  "Helping fund and produce" doesn't mean that the us govt developed any intellectual property. 

I'm asking out of curiosity  because I haven't studied in depth the development of the vaccine, but right now, my understanding is that the US Govt. didn't get in the way, and funded the development.  They're were not contractual promises that we would own the underlying intellectual property.  In fact, we were letting the pharma companies lose with the understanding that they would maintain the intellectual property rights.

[wildcat09 29,579]

7 minutes ago, Johnny Sack said:

Forced?  

Yes, under threat of having their unemployment cut off. "Go to work in dangerous conditions without adequate protection or enjoy homelessness" = forced.

[tantric superman 4,668]

6 minutes ago, Longhorn_Fan68 said:

um, because it's in our national interest.  because if we don't get this virus under control at home and abroad we will never get back to normal.

How is it in our national interest to punish private companies who developed the vaccine?

What does this have to do with getting the virus under control at home and abroad?  We certainly can assist the manufacturers in producing more vaccine without making them waive intellectual property rights. 

We can give a trillion dollars right now to Moderna and some drug manufacturers and tell them to get the stuff to India in a jiffy and the Indians would love us long time.

 

 

[Johnny Sack 8,397]

3 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

Yes, under threat of having their unemployment cut off. "Go to work in dangerous conditions without adequate protection or enjoy homelessness" = forced.

Link?  

[Captainant 28,536]

8 minutes ago, Johnny Sack said:

Link?  

'We're modern slaves': How meat plant workers became the new frontline in Covid-19 war

Meatpacking workers in Texas Panhandle have little power to avoid the coronavirus

Unions, advocates say Trump putting meat packing workers at risk

and I'm happy to find more articles for your reading pleasure, but the majority of meat packing workers are either immigrants or people of color so I'd imagine it's more a feature than a bug to you.

Edited May 6, 2021 by Captainant

[Neonmoon 38,130]

8 minutes ago, tantric superman said:

Explain to me how pharma didn't develop the intellectual property we are asking them to waive.  "Helping fund and produce" doesn't mean that the us govt developed any intellectual property. 

I'm asking out of curiosity  because I haven't studied in depth the development of the vaccine, but right now, my understanding is that the US Govt. didn't get in the way, and funded the development.  They're were not contractual promises that we would own the underlying intellectual property.  In fact, we were letting the pharma companies lose with the understanding that they would maintain the intellectual property rights.

There are so many different people and organizations that helped develop the vaccine over years and years. These companies did not just poof, come up with a vaccine in 2020. 

DARPA has been funding this research for years. 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/how-a-secretive-pentagon-agency-seeded-the-ground-for-a-rapid-coronavirus-cure/2020/07/30/ad1853c4-c778-11ea-a9d3-74640f25b953_story.html

Quote

If it weren’t for DARPA’s investments over the past decade and earlier, largely outside the glare of Washington’s partisan politics, the American race toward a vaccine and antibody therapy to stop the coronavirus most likely wouldn’t be moving as quickly as it is today.

 

“Being at DARPA at this time ... is exciting in some ways because we get to see the research work that was funded that was done ten to fifteen years ago now really starting to pay off,” acting director Peter Highnam said in a discussion with reporters on Thursday.

 

The first company in the United States to enter clinical trials with a vaccine for the virus was funded by DARPA. So was the second company

https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2020-11-10

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/05/18/coronavirus-vaccine-first-results/

Quote

Moderna also received $483 million from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, a federal agency.

Quote

The vaccine was co-developed by Moderna, Inc., a biotechnology company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health.

https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/peer-reviewed-report-moderna-covid-19-vaccine-publishes#:~:text=The vaccine was co-,from the COVE trial.

[Neonmoon 38,130]

And did we already forget UT's contribution? We developed the antigen model used in the fucking vaccines. 

https://news.utexas.edu/2020/12/01/texas-coronavirus-scientists-win-award-for-research-with-great-societal-benefit/

Quote

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) cited winners’ contributions that led to the development of promising vaccines, antibody treatments and other efforts to thwart COVID-19. McLellan and Wrapp received recognition for work with scientists in Belgium and elsewhere to engineer an antibody produced by llamas for use in fighting the current coronavirus. The pair also collaborated with researchers at the National Institutes of Health’s Vaccine Research Center to develop a stabilized spike protein now used as an antigen in many leading vaccines to fight the current coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2.

In case you were wondering

Quote

Supported by members of Congress from both parties and a coalition of businesses, universities and scientific societies since 2012, the prize this year went to scientists “whose federally funded research has had a significant impact for the response and treatment of COVID-19.”

The taxpayers paid for this. 

So while Moderna/Pfizer/AZ should get paid for their work. It's not like the good old taxpayers didn't do a lot of the heavy lifting. 

[4th&Five 42,004]

 

[tantric superman 4,668]

1 minute ago, Neonmoon said:

So while Moderna/Pfizer/AZ should get paid for their work. It's not like the good old taxpayers didn't do a lot of the heavy lifting. 

That's totally understood.  Literally all American business is built upon infrastructure and "heavy lifting" by American educational institutions. 

That being said, the headlines imply a waiver of intellectual property rights -- a forced contractual waiver.

Are we changing the contract we made with these guys after the fact?  And is THAT good public policy?

 

[StassneyHorn 6,767]

You know things are getting back to normal when Sack strolls in on a Thursday HH to shitpost. 

[Longhorn_Fan68 34,104]

4 minutes ago, tantric superman said:

That's totally understood.  Literally all American business is built upon infrastructure and "heavy lifting" by American educational institutions. 

That being said, the headlines imply a waiver of intellectual property rights -- a forced contractual waiver.

Are we changing the contract we made with these guys after the fact?  And is THAT good public policy?

 

depends on who wrote/guided the contract. former guy? then it's probably a shit deal for the american public. big biotech is already cashing in by getting paid for 100% of their doses instead of hoping insurance gives them 40%. 

[Foosters 18,279]

Just now, StassneyHorn said:

You know things are getting back to normal when Sack strolls in on a Thursday HH to shitpost. 

I just assumed he lost access to DT. Isn't that the board to make fun of black people?

[tantric superman 4,668]

9 minutes ago, Longhorn_Fan68 said:

depends on who wrote/guided the contract. former guy? then it's probably a shit deal for the american public. big biotech is already cashing in by getting paid for 100% of their doses instead of hoping insurance gives them 40%. 

Yep.  Filthy lucre is a powerful incentive.

[Longhorn_Fan68 34,104]

Just now, tantric superman said:

Yep.  Filthy lucre is a powerful incentive.

thanks for a new turn of phrase.

[washparkhorn 9,973]

The US is leading - once more. This is an enormous foreign policy achievement that will benefit us against our adversaries:

GENEVA (AP) — Several world leaders Thursday praised the U.S. call to remove patent protections on COVID-19 vaccines to help poor countries obtain shots. But the proposal faces a multitude of hurdles, including resistance from the pharmaceutical industry.

Activists and humanitarian institutions cheered after the U.S. reversed course Wednesday and called for a waiver of intellectual property protections on the vaccine. The decision ultimately is up to the 164-member World Trade Organization, and if just one country votes against a waiver, the proposal will fail.

The Biden administration announcement made the U.S. the first country in the developed world with big vaccine manufacturing to publicly support the waiver idea floated by India and South Africa in October.

https://apnews.com/article/africa-coronavirus-pandemic-global-trade-business-science-e60a859a0164f51aa20feb4b9b24b6a9

[Brisketexan 106,890]

Just now, washparkhorn said:

The US is leading - once more. This is an enormous foreign policy achievement that will benefit us against our adversaries:

GENEVA (AP) — Several world leaders Thursday praised the U.S. call to remove patent protections on COVID-19 vaccines to help poor countries obtain shots. But the proposal faces a multitude of hurdles, including resistance from the pharmaceutical industry.

Activists and humanitarian institutions cheered after the U.S. reversed course Wednesday and called for a waiver of intellectual property protections on the vaccine. The decision ultimately is up to the 164-member World Trade Organization, and if just one country votes against a waiver, the proposal will fail.

The Biden administration announcement made the U.S. the first country in the developed world with big vaccine manufacturing to publicly support the waiver idea floated by India and South Africa in October.

https://apnews.com/article/africa-coronavirus-pandemic-global-trade-business-science-e60a859a0164f51aa20feb4b9b24b6a9

This is correct.

What a whole lot of people fail to recognize it that perception and presentation often matter a great deal more than substance does.  A good trial lawyer knows this: you may have the facts and the law on your side, but if your client is a giant dickhead, and the opposing party is a decent type.....a jury will often find a way to issue a verdict in favor of the decent guy over the dickhead.

Much of what we want to do in foreign policy depends on -- at least in material part -- the goodwill of other parties cooperating with us/allowing us to proceed.  They are more likely to cooperate with a good faith, decent partner (who they might even somewhat disagree with on an issue) than they are to cooperate with an utter dickhead.

Not being a dickhead is pretty important.  Some people mistakenly think it's a positive attribute (I'm the biggest boy on the block, and I don't take shit from anyone!)....but they're wrong, and history says so.  Much of what we've accomplished in the post-war period was because we were seen as a relatively trustworthy and decent partner (I said "relatively" we did plenty of realpolitik backstabbing, and everyone knows it, but it was within the bounds of what other world players will accept).

Acts of general goodwill like this -- regardless of the ultimate outcome -- are good moves.

[Biff Tannen 46,164]

1 hour ago, washparkhorn said:

The US is leading - once more. This is an enormous foreign policy achievement that will benefit us against our adversaries:

GENEVA (AP) — Several world leaders Thursday praised the U.S. call to remove patent protections on COVID-19 vaccines to help poor countries obtain shots. But the proposal faces a multitude of hurdles, including resistance from the pharmaceutical industry.

Activists and humanitarian institutions cheered after the U.S. reversed course Wednesday and called for a waiver of intellectual property protections on the vaccine. The decision ultimately is up to the 164-member World Trade Organization, and if just one country votes against a waiver, the proposal will fail.

The Biden administration announcement made the U.S. the first country in the developed world with big vaccine manufacturing to publicly support the waiver idea floated by India and South Africa in October.

https://apnews.com/article/africa-coronavirus-pandemic-global-trade-business-science-e60a859a0164f51aa20feb4b9b24b6a9

Nuh uh, I was told that it was Merica First and fuck everyone else cause Merica First!

[wildcat09 29,579]

4 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

This is correct.

What a whole lot of people fail to recognize it that perception and presentation often matter a great deal more than substance does.  A good trial lawyer knows this: you may have the facts and the law on your side, but if your client is a giant dickhead, and the opposing party is a decent type.....a jury will often find a way to issue a verdict in favor of the decent guy over the dickhead.

Much of what we want to do in foreign policy depends on -- at least in material part -- the goodwill of other parties cooperating with us/allowing us to proceed.  They are more likely to cooperate with a good faith, decent partner (who they might even somewhat disagree with on an issue) than they are to cooperate with an utter dickhead.

Not being a dickhead is pretty important.  Some people mistakenly think it's a positive attribute (I'm the biggest boy on the block, and I don't take shit from anyone!)....but they're wrong, and history says so.  Much of what we've accomplished in the post-war period was because we were seen as a relatively trustworthy and decent partner (I said "relatively" we did plenty of realpolitik backstabbing, and everyone knows it, but it was within the bounds of what other world players will accept).

Acts of general goodwill like this -- regardless of the ultimate outcome -- are good moves.

For example, Johnny is already drunk posting today, because he's drinking alone, because he's got no friends. Because he's an asshole. 

[Anastasis 23,717]

17 minutes ago, washparkhorn said:

The US is leading - once more. This is an enormous foreign policy achievement that will benefit us against our adversaries:

GENEVA (AP) — Several world leaders Thursday praised the U.S. call to remove patent protections on COVID-19 vaccines to help poor countries obtain shots. But the proposal faces a multitude of hurdles, including resistance from the pharmaceutical industry.

Activists and humanitarian institutions cheered after the U.S. reversed course Wednesday and called for a waiver of intellectual property protections on the vaccine. The decision ultimately is up to the 164-member World Trade Organization, and if just one country votes against a waiver, the proposal will fail.

The Biden administration announcement made the U.S. the first country in the developed world with big vaccine manufacturing to publicly support the waiver idea floated by India and South Africa in October.

https://apnews.com/article/africa-coronavirus-pandemic-global-trade-business-science-e60a859a0164f51aa20feb4b9b24b6a9

Merkel is going to kill it at WTO. 

[Brisketexan 106,890]

9 minutes ago, Anastasis said:

Merkel is going to kill it at WTO. 

Let her.

 

Man, how refreshing to watch the Germans be the bad guys again.  Feels like a Sunday afternoon viewing session on the History Channel.

[tantric superman 4,668]

Again, someone explain to me how we can't engage in scads of good will and assistance to South Africa and India, outside of forcing the pharmas to waive their intellectual property rights?

Strikes me as short sighted as fuck.  And also pretty poor goddamn planning on the front end -- we could have anticipated how it would look if some of these countries were on the short end of the stick and weren't getting vaccines.

Edited May 6, 2021 by tantric superman

[Anastasis 23,717]

2 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

Let her.

 

Man, how refreshing to watch the Germans be the bad guys again.  Feels like a Sunday afternoon viewing session on the History Channel.

I don't think that it makes her the "bad guy".  I think that she understands that this is largely a masturbatory gesture and that it is a better spend of time and resources to shore up raw ingredient supply chains and scale production capabilities within the well established production chain. 

[washparkhorn 9,973]

8 minutes ago, Anastasis said:

Merkel is going to kill it at WTO. 

Hope not.

Soft Power increases for Western Democracies (e.g., temporary waiver of patents to aid nations struggling) can obviate the need for military force. 

[Anastasis 23,717]

1 minute ago, tantric superman said:

Strikes me as short sighted as fuck.  And also pretty poor goddamn planning on the front end -- we could have anticipated how it would look if some of these countries where on the short end of the stick.

I think that it was anticipated. AZ/Oxford was always suppose to be the broad solution for the third world. Easier and more scalable production relative to the mRNA stuff. 

[Brisketexan 106,890]

Just now, Anastasis said:

I don't think that it makes her the "bad guy".  I think that she understands that this is largely a masturbatory gesture and that it is a better spend of time and resources to shore up raw ingredient supply chains and scale production capabilities within the well established production chain. 

Oh, I'm neutral  on the outcome.  I'm commenting on the appearances.  Her approach may well be the smarter and more responsible one.  Like the parent who requires the kids to eat veggies -- good move....but everyone loves the parent who serves the kids cake for breakfast.

Well, unless he drugs them and rapes them.

 

 

[InkaUtexas 26,870]

Shit, China and Russia will stop anything they can and keep pumping out their vaccines. I have not seen anything about their efficiencies over time, but some of the early data out of Brazil was not that great. 

[washparkhorn 9,973]

 

[Brisketexan 106,890]

1 minute ago, washparkhorn said:

 

CSB: when they lived in Buenos Aires 20 years ago, a member of my parents' social circle was an older, flamboyant blonde -- she was a travel agent, storyteller, bon vivant, and was at every party of note.  Her father was one of the first German "industrialists" to relocate to Argentina back in the day.

It was kind of hard to avoid the progeny of Nazis if you were going to move about in Buenos Aires life back then.

[InkaUtexas 26,870]

Same shit in Bolivia. But they did have some damn good beer. 

[Anastasis 23,717]

6 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

I'm commenting on the appearances.

Consider the appearances when a facility without high level quality controls, using technology they are not intimately familiar with in the manufacture process, botches production of a batch of vaccine. What about the appearances when you have negative outcomes, either reduced effectiveness or even worse some safety issues. Consider the impact that might have wrt vax uptake, not only domestically but also internationally.

PFE/BNT on track to make 3B doses this year. MRNA 1B, ramping to 3B in 2022. IMO, work to extend their ability to scale and shore up supply chain. The energy being put into this IP discussion would be better spent on developing the distribution and administration infrastructure. That lack of infrastructure is the more likely choke point in vaccinating the third world.  

 

 

[Anastasis 23,717]

A perspective on the real world impact of waiving IP...

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/05/06/waiving-ip

Waiving IP

By Derek Lowe 6 May, 2021

The announcement by the Biden administration about waiving IP rights to the coronavirus vaccines obviously calls for some comment. Keep in mind that I have been doing research in the pharma industry for over 30 years now, so my viewpoint is obviously going to be affected by that, for better and for worse.

With that said, what you think about this move will depend on what you hope to accomplish by it. Let’s go to the immediate practical concern: will it open up the near-term supply of vaccines to the world? It will probably come as no surprise, but no, I don’t think it will do that. One big reason is that I don’t think that patent rights are the main reason for supply constraints – they’re not the bottleneck or the “rate-limiting step”, to use the language of chemistry. IP could be, if several other bottlenecks would get out of the way, but for now I don’t think that it is. Update: Alex Tabarrok on this issue here.

 

Quote

 

Non-IP Constraints on Vaccine Supply

I’ve gone over these other problems before, but here’s a brief summary of those – not in any order, because it’s difficult to rank them and those ranks change. An obvious first problem is hardware: you need specific sorts of cell culture tanks for the adenovirus vaccines, and the right kind of filtration apparatus for both the mRNA and adenovirus ones. You also need specialized mixing equipment for the formation of the mRNA lipid nanoparticles. A good proportion of the world’s supply of such hardware is already producing the vaccines, to the best of my knowledge. Second, you need some key consumable equipment to go along with the hardware. Cell culture bags have been a limiting step for the Novavax subunit vaccine, as have the actual filtration membranes needed for it and others. These are not in short supply because of patents, and waiving vaccine patents will not make them appear. Third, you need some key reagents. Among others, there’s an “end-capping” enzyme that has been a supply constraint, and there are the lipids needed for the mRNA nanoparticles, for those two vaccines. Those lipids are indeed proprietary, but their synthesis is also subject to physical constraints that have nothing to do with patent rights, such as the availability of the ultimate starting materials. Supplies have been increasing via the tried and true method of offering people money to make more, but switching over equipment and getting the synthesis to work within acceptable QC is not as fast a process as you might imagine. Fourth, for all these processes, there is a shortage of actual people to make the tech transfer work. For most reasonably complicated processes, it helps a great deal to have experienced people come out and troubleshoot, because the number of tiny things that can go wrong is not easy to quantify. Moderna, for one, has said that a limiting factor in their tech-transfer efforts is that they simply do not have enough trained people to go around. And keep in mind that these all have to do with producing a stream of liquid vaccine solution – but you need what the industry calls “fill-and-finish” capacity to deal with it after that. Filling and capping sterile vials for injection is a specialized business and the great majority of large-scale capacity is already being used for the existing vaccines. Time and money will fix that, and has been, but waiving vaccine patents won’t.

Short Term Versus Long Term Supply

The mention of scale deserves some comment. We need to vaccinate billions of people around the world – no argument there. But that means that if you’re working under the constraints above, your time and effort are best spent on the largest capacity manufacturing efforts available. I believe that the majority of these are already enlisted in the vaccine production efforts, though, both in the production and fill-and-finish areas. I have seen people talking about how now every country will be able to produce its own vaccines, but that’s not a feasible or useful idea. Most countries do not have industrial cell culture capacity or sterile fill-and-finish lines, and trying to start them from scratch is not a good use of the time, money, and effort. It would be like deciding that Switzerland needs to be self-sufficient in sushi.

Look at a part of pharma world that (while it has its technical aspects, for sure) is much less demanding than vaccines, the production of small-molecule generic drugs. The chemical matter involved is off-patent, and nonpatented routes are available for them. But the great majority of these drugs are still made in a handful of countries, and if you trace the starting material supply chains back, the list of countries and suppliers narrow still more. As with most industries, you find yourself going back to the people with the expertise and equipment to produce things on large scale.

As mentioned several times during the above, these supply problems are all fixable. Indeed, many of them are already greatly improved compared to the situation a few months ago. But from what I can see, none of this fixing would have been aided by waiving the patent rights to the vaccines themselves at some earlier date. The supply of vaccines has been increasing, and would continue to increase without the patent waiver idea. The constraints are physical ones, supply chains and engineering ones, not legal.

We actually have some proof of this already. As others have noted, Moderna announced last October that they would not enforce any of their own patents on the production of the vaccine. But this has not led, as far as I can tell, to any non-Moderna production of it, or even the announcement that anyone is thinking about it. A more cynical person than I am – they exist – might conclude that Moderna knew this full well when they made their announcement, but in either case, this situation largely obtains because of the constraints above.

What Does the Patent Waiver Proposal Entail?

We also need to talk about what the Biden administration has proposed. Despite some headlines, the announcement was not something like “All patents are waived”. The actual text uses this language:

“The administration believes strongly in intellectual property protections, but in service of ending this pandemic supports the waiver of these protections for COVID-19 vaccines. We will actively participate in text-based negotiations with the World Trade Organization (WTO) needed to make that happen. These negotiations will take time given the consensus-based nature of the institution and the complexity of the issues involved.”

That last sentence is actually a bit of a warning and a bit of cover for the amount of time that this will take. No IP has been waived yet, because the WTO and the World Intellectual Property Organization (the international framework for patent protection that most countries belong to) are going to have to weigh in on this. There are several countries involved in the existing patents, and they will all have their say as well. The WTO meets next in June, and at that point we’ll start to see how protracted a process this will be. It could indeed take a while, and what emerges at the end of it is of course not yet clear. Not every government involved is going to be thrilled.

This is why many comments on this decision have called it as much of a public relations move as anything else. I can see the point. It is indeed a big step for a US administration to call for something like this, because the US (with a large proportion of the R&D-driven industry in the world) has traditionally been very hard-line on patent protection. But calling for it is not the same as delivering it (for various definitions of “it” and various values assigned to them!) For now, the US government has agreed to start to think about how to negotiate the issue, with details to follow at an undetermined later point.

The Desirability of IP Waivers, and of Patents in General

I know that many people are ready to argue these points, and I can see why. They’re fun. They’re emotional, and lend themselves to ringing statements of righteous principle, and I feel the temptation as much as anyone. But I’m going to try to hold back, which is one reason I’m writing this post this morning instead of banging something out last night.

First off, I am simply not going to take on the “Big Pharma is evil and they deserve what’s coming to them” point of view. Boy, can you find a lot of that one on social media, and I’m trying not to respond to all of it (although I have slipped a few times). So let me just say that I have not worked the past thirty-something years of my life to poison people, to keep them sick, or to bury cures so no one can find them. I have seen good friends, colleagues, and beloved members of my own family succumb to the very diseases that I have researched treatments for, and if I could have done something for them, I would have. I know it’s fun for passionate activists and grandstanding politicians to pretend that that they’re battling hordes of Vile Inhuman Pharma Fascists, but folks, it’s actually mostly a bunch of people like me. That’s not to say that we don’t have some real bastards in this business, but guess what? So do you, in yours. We stock the buildings with people, and they’re not all gems. I hate the Martin Shkrelis of the world as much as you do.

Now, to patents themselves. It’s not that great a use of our time to have the fight right here, either, but it will come as no surprise that I think that intellectual property protections, while they can be abused, are a net good. I think that incentives are a good thing, and that IP rights provide an incentive to take the risks needed to discover things. But those are broad terms. The degree of such protection and how long it lasts are of course key things to get right, and you can get them wrong, too. For example, I think that current US copyright law is way too restrictive and should be rolled back to something less lengthy. Imagine if drug patents lasted through the lifetimes of the inventors and 70 years past that! Penicillin wouldn’t be generic yet.

Remember, a patent is not a secret. You have to disclose how your invention works and how to make it work in order to be granted one, and others can go ahead and get to work on how to make you obsolete based on that information. Also remember that for many drugs, by the time the patent issues, it often has eaten up most of its lifetime. The clock doesn’t start ticking from approval; it starts from the application priority date. I have found over the years that many people outside of R&D do not realize these two points.

I can imagine different ways of doing it, though, most of which involve some other way of rewarding inventors via prizes and the like. For these to work well, though, I believe that such prizes would need to be on the same order of magnitude as the value of a patent as we issue them now. A tricky aspect of this is that this value is not always immediately obvious – sometimes things turn out to be more valuable, and sometimes less than they appeared. That’s another detail to be worked out in a prize system, but there are several ways to do it. With such systems, you’re still recognizing that there is such a thing as valuable intellectual property – you’re just finding a different way to reward it.

What I don’t see working, though, is the “Get rid of all intellectual property, everything should be free” viewpoint. I’m not even going to debate it, because to be honest, I lost my taste back in college for endless wrangling about infuriating hypotheticals, and that’s all this proposal is. I refuse to take it seriously, and I refuse to take seriously the people who attempt to advance it.

But that means that proposals to abrogate existing IP protections need to be taken seriously, because I believe that you’re messing around with something of great importance. In its crudest form, an IP waiver is a direct taking of such property from its discoverers and owners without compensation, and I don’t like it at all. A system that allows such things to happen whenever people really feel like it will not work as well as one in which property rights are protected.

All That Money

I realize that this talk of IP waivers comes, as fate would have it, while some of the vaccine companies are reporting earnings on the vaccines themselves. Pfizer, for example, has said that they may well have $26 billion of sales of the vaccine that they developed with BioNTech. And while I don’t know what the actual profit will be, it’s going to still be a lot. Allow me to be offensive: good for them. 26 billion is a small fraction of the economic damage that’s been done during the year because of the pandemic, and these vaccines are really the only way out of it. Add to that the incalculable social and psychological damages, and it’s a damned cheap price for all of the vaccines put together. Remember, there was no guarantee that any of these things would work – several large and very competent drug companies (Merck, GSK, Sanofi) failed in their own vaccine efforts.

The vaccines that have worked have been the result of years of work by both academia and industry. Both of these groups have hoped to profit by their efforts. And as I never seem to get tired of pointing out, a lot of that work went into discovering things that didn’t work. RNA constructs that fell apart or didn’t produce much protein. Formulations that didn’t deliver, or were toxic. Viral vectors that weren’t worked-out enough, or couldn’t be produced in sufficient quantity. Genetic payloads that weren’t written in quite the right ways. So when something finally does work, I am all for being able to profit from it, and to cheer on the people who are hoping to profit from the discoveries that are working their way through the academic and industrial labs now.

 

 

Edited May 6, 2021 by Anastasis
quotes are hard

[washparkhorn 9,973]

11 minutes ago, Anastasis said:

Consider the appearances when a facility without high level quality controls, using technology they are not intimately familiar with in the manufacture process, botches production of a batch of vaccine. What about the appearances when you have negative outcomes, either reduced effectiveness or even worse some safety issues. Consider the impact that might have wrt vax uptake, not only domestically but also internationally.

PFE/BNT on track to make 3B doses this year. MRNA 1B, ramping to 3B in 2022. IMO, work to extend their ability to scale and shore up supply chain. The energy being put into this IP discussion would be better spent on developing the distribution and administration infrastructure. That lack of infrastructure is the more likely choke point in vaccinating the third world.  

How about we just nationalize Emergent BioSolutions, a manufacturing partner to both Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca, the British-Swedish company whose vaccine has yet to be authorized for use in the United States. 

They screwed the pooch.

[Dahobbs 18,318]

24 minutes ago, Anastasis said:

Consider the appearances when a facility without high level quality controls, using technology they are not intimately familiar with in the manufacture process, botches production of a batch of vaccine. What about the appearances when you have negative outcomes, either reduced effectiveness or even worse some safety issues. Consider the impact that might have wrt vax uptake, not only domestically but also internationally.

PFE/BNT on track to make 3B doses this year. MRNA 1B, ramping to 3B in 2022. IMO, work to extend their ability to scale and shore up supply chain. The energy being put into this IP discussion would be better spent on developing the distribution and administration infrastructure. That lack of infrastructure is the more likely choke point in vaccinating the third world.  

 

 

I agree with this. But I also believe a temporary waiver is the right thing to do. If someone is proposing permanent waivers on patents, I'm totally against that. But I have a hard time seeing the problem with a humanitarian waiver for the limited purpose of getting Covid-19 vaccinations out the door. I agree we shouldn't spend a ton of energy on it, but that also means I don't think there should be a ton of energy spent opposing it. Let's do the waiver while also moving on the big stuff. Either the waiver helps to some small degree or worse case its a kind gesture that unfortunately can't be taken advantage of. Why fight about it at all? 

[Anastasis 23,717]

19 minutes ago, washparkhorn said:

How about we just nationalize Emergent BioSolutions, a manufacturing partner to both Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca, the British-Swedish company whose vaccine has yet to be authorized for use in the United States. 

They screwed the pooch.

Precisely.  Perfect example. This is an approved facility with tight controls and they fucked up with some cross contamination because somebody took a short cut.  The QA checks caught it, but goes to show how easy it is to fuck these complex manufacturing processes up.  Now what happens when the problem does not get caught as a result of lax or substandard QA in a third world manufacturing plant?

Edited May 6, 2021 by Anastasis

[Anastasis 23,717]

5 minutes ago, Dahobbs said:

But I have a hard time seeing the problem with a humanitarian waiver for the limited purpose of getting Covid-19 vaccinations out the door.

This begs the question. 

[PsychMike 1,553]

13 minutes ago, Anastasis said:

Precisely.  Perfect example. This is an approved facility with tight controls and they fucked up with some cross contamination because somebody took a short cut.  The QA checks caught it, but goes to show how easy it is to fuck these complex manufacturing processes up.  Now what happens when the problem does not get caught as a result of lax or substandard QA in a third world manufacturing plant?

Bingo! This can and does happen in shithole countries even when making small molecule compounds, which is one of the primary reasons the FDA has opposed drug reimportation as a means to reduce drug pricing in the US.

[Dahobbs 18,318]

6 minutes ago, Anastasis said:

This begs the question. 

No it doesn't. It is a conclusion. If, as you and others in the industry have said, that waiving IP isn't going to solve the road blocks or allow others to quickly manufacture vaccines, then what is the financial harm in providing a temporary waiver? Or maybe you are using the less formal usage of "begs the question" to mean it leads to another question. If so, what is that question? Something to do with the scope of waiver? 

[Anastasis 23,717]

18 minutes ago, Dahobbs said:

Or maybe you are using the less formal usage of "begs the question" to mean it leads to another question.

No, I am using the right definition of the term. You beg the question. There is no real evidence that IP waivers will yield an increase in production. Moderna signaled that they would waive patent protections in October 2020. Since then, nobody has stepped up to produce. So nobody has really articulated a path towards clear and tangible benefit, or even near term potential benefit, of waiving IP protection. However, we have some very clear down side risks, with actual real world examples of what can go wrong with manufacturing (even in highly regulated facilities producing the less complex vaccines). This whole discussion is ungrounded feel good messaging with no impact on the real world issues at stake, which is the excellent realm of politicians I realize.  Problem is that the downside risks are greater than the upside.  We don't need to FAFO on this one, either in the short term or the longer term with precedent setting. 

[Anastasis 23,717]

42 minutes ago, PsychMike said:

Bingo! This can and does happen in shithole countries even when making small molecule compounds, which is one of the primary reasons the FDA has opposed drug reimportation as a means to reduce drug pricing in the US.

Precisely, and small molecule compounds are fucking child's play compared to the manufacturing processes involved in wrapping customized mRNA is lipid nanoparticles and maintaining a cold chain distribution network.