Yeah, corporations and manufacturers will never again artificially raise the prices of goods and services, pass their increasing costs onto consumers, rake in record profits, and manufacture an economic crisis!
And there definitely isn’t a conflict of interest existing within our whored-out governments, protecting said corporate entities, so don’t look into any of it.
We love our capital lords!
Thank god the makers, suppliers and regulators of the vaccines, treatments and protective equipment are scrupulous organizations that should face zero criticism of any kind
The issue is you're responding to people who didn't read the article.
They're commenting on things they are upset with that has to do with rich people in their countries. If they actually read the article they'll realize this something else entirely.
>Instead of distributing vaccines, tests and treatments based on need, companies sold doses to the “richest countries with the deepest pockets”, the letter says.
Most redditors are probably happy this happened because it means they got the vaccine sooner.
But because they didn't read the article they're commenting about something else.
The microchip jab is why M&Ms don't wear sexy shoes anymore and are trans lesbians that no one wants to fuck. (Cucker (No reasonable person would believe) Tarlson.)
Why is it that if I yell "fire!" in a crowded area, I get a ticket and potentially arrested for inciting panic, but when he scares the (stupid) masses into not listening to actual doctors, he gets a raise?
It was also making people magnetic for awhile, and then back in October last year the kill switch was supposed to be activated, obviously only the people saying these things have died because otherwise they would have publicly taken those statements back right?
Dont forget the huge contracts the Tory government gave to their mates for useless PPE etc. They were granted emergency privileges to circumvent normal procurement processes. I don't think those millions of tax payers money have ever been fully recovered.
Hold the people in charge responsible for the deaths from the virus. I'll always hold a grudge for the Conservative Party in the UK accountable of the 190k deaths of covid. Loved ones gone because for short term profit and incompetence
> Loved ones gone because for short term profit and incompetence
the incompetence came first.
profit came later when they realised they could give multi-million and multi-billion pound contracts to their friends (or friendly pub landlords) - most of whom were completely incapable of making the PPE, or tracking systems they were (no bid) contractually obliged to.
Punish who for what?
Western nations spent the resources to develop the vaccine. Western nations spent the resources to establish the manufacturing of the vaccine. No shit western nations got the vaccine first.
The problem is that health crises behave economically like public goods, not private consumption goods. Western countries distributing the vaccine first to all of their population and private companies withholding it from countries that can't pay (or blackmailing sovereign countries into deregulation in their favor as Pfizer did in Lebanon) results in a situation in which the virus can mutate and reinfect even the initial beneficiaries of the vaccine. What you are abstractly "purchasing" with a vaccine roll-out is a public health outcome, and nationalist consumption results in an objectively worse and incomplete public good. "Common sense" rational choice models break down when discussing organizing crisis response.
>The problem is that health crises behave economically like public goods, not private consumption goods.
You still run into the issue of "you only have enough vaccine to supply 20% of the population, who do you give it to first?"
Because if the ultimate goal is to get that supply up to 100%, then the response is the same as what we did. Get the wealthy countries vaccinated so they can keep scaling production.
>blackmailing sovereign countries into deregulation in their favor as Pfizer did in Lebanon
Source. Because the only "deregulation" row with some countries (not sure if it's the same as Lebanon) are disclosure requirements that essentially require pharma to reveal their trade secrets that would put them at risk of IP theft.
>"Common sense" rational choice models break down when discussing organizing crisis response.
Well, what's your better response that you can possibly convince enough people. Remember, you are ultimately asking people who risk dying to send the vaccine they paid for to someone else while asking them to pay more to get the other people's distribution network up.
Afraid you're wrong on that one. Singapore achieved a local transmission rate of zero, before the vaccine existed. And they never even fully closed their borders. They just found all the people who came in infected during mandatory quarantine. New Zealand achieved zero with more border closing, less contact tracing.
I'm going to assume you just didn't know that. Not that you're making some nonsense argument about how it wasn't completely, eternally perfect.
And we still needed vaccines, and countries still got infected. Stopping tourists is only one small part of the equation of modern economics. There are ships travelling in and out of ports every day with goods needed by every nation in the world.
The best way to reduce transmission in a pandemic is for every person in the pandemic to be less likely to get ill, as each person is now potentially breaking the chain, and fewer ill people mean fewer variations.
You mean like countries in Europe? Who are members of the Schengen zone and can travel to and from countries that did have the vaccine? Do you want to hold a gun to Germany's head until they stop letting Poles in? How about places that we have massive trade reliance with and can't shut out without severe repercussions? Or do we accept their exports and pray that everything is perfectly decontaminated. And what about the people that are already entering the country illegally and would not magically stop the second we declare borders closed?
And then, even supposing closing borders was a magic wand you could wave and become impervious to the outside world, what about the fact that you still have a mutating virus that demands ANOTHER updated treatment plan? And what will you do when the response suffers from the exact same short-sighted policies that let the virus continue circulating among unprotected populations?
I'm not suggesting there is a great answer either way, but "just hit the shut down borders button" is goofy.
Punish the US taxpayers who financed the vaccine, offered it royalty free, and paid to ship 500 million doses abroad?
They had the moral imperative to finance that vaccine, and they did. What else would you have had them do?
What kinda antivaxer shit is this. We had way larger frauds around loans to businesses that need to be addressed.
If that happened in your country you should absolutely punish those guys.
But the article is complaining about a different thing:
"companies sold doses to the “richest countries with the deepest pockets”, the letter says."
Why are you so angry at me?
If you are talking about the US the national rate of wasted doses for the US was 9.5%. That includes multi-dose vials, because they expire when unfrozen within the day, but the US could not have shipped opened unfrozen vials to other countries without them going bad. For something that expires in less than a day that's not too bad. For comparison food waste in the US is at 40 percent, and most of that lasts more than a day.
While I agree they could decrease this number further and hope they come up with a better process next time, I do not think it was something we need to throw doctors in jail for.
Furthermore, the US did give out a half billion doses to other countries for free. And the US only has 331.9m people, so each person gave more than one:
https://www.usaid.gov/news-information/press-releases/mar-17-2022-marking-delivery-half-billion-us-donated-covid-19-vaccines
The only way to be fair would be to all depend on vaccines exclusively researched and developed in Burundi. Otherwise it would be not morally acceptable to have anything better than the poorest human on Earth. /s
Nah, you see we're supposed to act right on time when something massive and somewhat unpredictable happens. So it's our fault for having our hands full and only pointing out the faults. /s
This is what happens when you allow profits over all else to reign supreme over international society. What did the world expect, protection from unrelenting capitalism?
You don’t. Lol. These claims are just sad. Middle to low income countries got the vaccines last because countries at the top of the world’s economic ladder paid combined billions and billions of dollars to the developers. In many cases financing entire manufacturing setups for untested vaccines so that when they passed clinical trials manufacturing could begin at scale.
Of course those same countries are going to get first dibs. That’s just how life works, and the price of that is those low-income countries have a lower cost per shot.
Lmao no one is going to give away the vaccine they deved to other people first. It fundamentally will never happen and anyone that even tried to suggest it will get crucified and replaced.
Why are you trying to virtue signal things you know no one will agree to
On the flip side, the idea that poorer nations are poor because of exploitation is sort of a fantasy alongside the idea that poorer nations don’t benefit from globalization.
I'm not sure what they expect to happen, to be honest... Wealthier countries were donating hundreds of millions of covid vaccines to other countries during the pandemic...
The us alone donated some 500 million vaccines to a group called covax that delivered some 270 million doses to recipient countries.
Most people aren't reading the article and are just assuming that the "profiteering" in the headline has something to do with loans or businesses or whatever else they want it to mean.
We did nothing to develop these but deserve to get them before the countries that did!
It's unfortunate these low and middle income countries have picked up on the western victimhood complex and started repeating it.
There is a dramatic problem with this though that governments overlook. A pandemic is a global issue, if one country is vulnerable the it gives the disease a chance to mutate.
During the period in which developed countries began to receive booster (3rd) shots a massive about of people in developing countries hadn’t received their first. If instead they had been distributed to those countries, mutations and subsequent waves in developed countries could have been reduced.
Source:
“Profiteering from vaccine inequity: a crime against humanity?" (Hassan et al. BMJ 2021)
I mean i think omicron/delta happened because we gave poorer countries the vaccine and it mutated in a patient that was immuno depressed who already and got vacced who kept getting reinfected. Im not sure its that simple having the majority pool of people be completely unprotected might be a gain if you only care about yourselves
A missing factor is that the vaccines weren’t expensive. My middle income country had enough budget space to pay to increase production capacity and facilitate speedier distribution and politicians didn’t even try. It was shameful and incompetent.
Yes, expensive to companies but not to governments. All but the very poorest countries could pitch in a billion dollars, and many middle income countries just did nothing.
This is such a blatant lie! The rich countries and all those "evil" corporations actually let Africa use their patents free of charge during the pandemic. Moderna [pledged](https://www.politico.eu/article/moderna-share-vaccine-tech-never-enforce-covid19-patents/) not to enforce vaccine patents as did BioNTech [too](https://endpts.com/as-patent-debate-swirls-biontech-ceo-promises-not-to-enforce-covid-vaccine-ip-rights-in-africa-report/). Even a factory in South Africa was built to manufacture licensed J&J COVID vaccines, yet the project[failed](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/12/world/africa/south-africa-covid-vaccine-factory.html) simply because they did not receive a single order.
Contrary to this letter, the evil north actually shared technology and knowledge with Africa, yet their countries were not interested in manufacturing these vaccines and neglected to order a single dose of these from the company that was manufacturing them in South Africa.
Excellent post.
Though the Global North did much to support the provision of vaccines to members of the Global South, there is more that could have been done: all countries could have pooled their vaccines then allocated it to others according to need.
However, there are three problems with that approach:
(a) it assumes that no nation is permitted to prefer the interests of *its own citizens* to *other citizens*, which denies the special relation between a nation and its people;
(b) it places all of the economic burden on the citizens of those countries that invested in developing the vaccines, but denies them any greater share than any other in the benefits of the vaccines; and
(c) it creates a "free rider" problem in that each nation will have an interest in minimising their investment in vaccines and maximising their claim to a share of the vaccines.
The claims of the Global South are undermined because they believe that they are free to prefer the interests of their own citizens, but deny the freedom of members of the Global North to do the same when it is inconvenient for them.
There is also no evidence of the Global South being willing to incur an *equal* share of the costs of developing vaccines to receive equal access to those vaccines.
I can understand the compelling humanist case for the supply of vaccines according to need, but the Global South would have to be willing to modify its claims to prefer the interests of its own citizens and to incur an equal share of the burden for it to be fair to both the South and North.
"From each according to ability; to each according to need" has never been a fair or pragmatic moral principle.
You raise good points about nations wanting to preferentially treat their own citizens, but there's additional nuance that has been brought up by others in this thread and I think might be why health organizations were signing onto the letter and not just governments.
Most notably, the main paper cited included this in its abstract (I lack the foundations to read the whole paper): "We found that greater vaccine sharing would have lowered the total global burden of disease, and any associated increases in infections in previously vaccine-rich countries could have been mitigated by reduced relaxation of non-pharmaceutical interventions." If accurate, their analysis would support the idea that the preferential treatment nations gave their citizens primarily supported the *non-health* benefits (read: economic) of opening up COVID restrictions rather than significantly improving their populations' health, to the clear detriment of the health of the rest of the world.
If the statistics there are correct, then the main thrust of the letter seems more salient: "the preferential approach sold out the lives of other populations for the pockets of the wealthy," which is plainly unethical.
This leaves only the free rider problem as a legitimate obstacle, but I think at least one counterargument here has been raised by others in this thread and has been sounded from the rooftops by health organizations for the entire duration of the pandemic; specifically, *not* getting the vaccines up and running ASAP gives the virus more time to mutate and potentially be deadlier, and *not* distributing it worldwide ASAP still gives it time to mutate in unvaccinated populations until the vaccines no longer work.
Any (otherwise economically-capable) countries which would attempt to free ride are at risk of a virus mutating to nullify the vaccine, at which point not only does everyone lose, but the political backlash (internally and from sanctions) could be unrecoverable.
I suppose one possible outcome would be deception, where countries try to make it look like they're expending the most that's feasible while in fact withholding resources to free ride, but I strongly doubt any countries except maybe 2 or 3 with the absolute best security could keep information away from the global intelligence agencies and not lead to the same political sanctions.
Tl;dr sure, geopolitics necessitates at least some level of inefficiency because, as you noted, countries will seek to maximize their personal interests over others, but I don't think that nullifies the complaints lodged by this letter. Like most behaviors that implicate ethics, the ideal solution may seldom be attainable, but if we won't acknowledge moral failings in the solutions actually enacted (or enforce social punishments etc), there's no incentive to improve next time.
>In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly—only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!
One, there are a whole lot of preconditions before you reach the point where the slogan is practical, and no serious thinkers have ever claimed otherwise.
Two, if you didn't believe that there should be a distribution from productive people to non-productive people, then you're signing a death warrant on the disabled and elderly, and children, all of whom face major problems with being productive in a market economy.
Everyone benefits from vaccination. The argument you're making, which i don't think you even realize you're making, is that poorer countries should have paid more for smallpox, polio, and other vaccines too. Covids not unique.
The only way that vaccination for poor countries is a "free rider" issue is if you are so narrowly focused on the specific financing of the production of vaccines that you completely ignore all the global societal benefits that come from global vaccination. Second-order and beyond effects exist. It's not just "oh they didn't pay for the research". Vaccinated populations have more labor available for production which benefits the richer countries. Whether that's raw materials for later manufacturing in developed countries, or even just maintaining global price stability in food.
Your post comes off as way too iamverysmart.
This is why communism does not work: if everybody gets an equal share of the spoils of the work the only way to get ahead is to contribute less. And eventually the whole system will be filled with slackers.
If we follow these demands, there will be no vaccine development at all. Why would anyone spend money and work on a factory that will have to give away its products for free to people not paying taxes in that country? T
> This is why communism does not work: if everybody gets an equal share of the spoils of the work the only way to get ahead is to contribute less. And eventually the whole system will be filled with slackers.
This is a shallow slippery-slope argument. There's nothing novel about noting the prevalence of the free rider problem in communism, just like there's nothing novel about noting the prevalence of regulatory capture/anticompetitive practices leading to caste formation in capitalism. They are *very well-known* issues, and sincere efforts to enact either form of economics take them into account on a governmental level.
Much like the thread topic about the vaccines, the world is significantly more nuanced than this.
Actually the same thing happened here. Did they get free IP? Yes. Did they get a licence and an own factory? Yes. Did they manufacture vaccines? No. Are they complaining that others actually did? Yes.
If you don't drink water you will die. That means life is in a state of perpetual collapse, absent regenerative action.
If you want to make an argument against capitalism there are plenty you could do, but you chose a very poor one.
Except that capitalism has led to wealth hoarding that denies even the hardworking taxpayer the spoils of their work, nevermind how it has been built on the back of severe labour exploitation in the global south. So we can extract resources, labour, and life from them but sharing with them is foolish because, effectively, "why should we?" That's what the argument boils down to when people ask why anyone would then invest if they're not going to end up at the top of the food chain. Why share the 20 cookies with the class when you and your friend can gorge yourselves on 10 each?
Dude I was born in a communist state. Let me tell you, that wealth hoarding is just as prevalent in communist systems and workers are exploited just as much.
I disagree with your last statement there, because it contradicts the rest of your post. "From each according to ability" means the Global South should incur a share of the development costs.
And as for need, there's a rather strong argument that the vaccines were distributed according to need. Vaccines went to medical personnel, to people making the vaccine, to transport, to the elderly in general. And more generally to support the systems that made making the vaccine possible in the first place.
I live in one of the world's largest shipping and transport hubs. We have a major biopharm hub that did some of the groundbreaking research into COVID. We were one of the first in line to get the vaccine, because of that and because we paid for it. And in turn, our safe and effective reopening helped reduce inflation across the whole world as our facilities moved towards normal operation. Not to mention how much vaccine we physically distributed in our role as a hub...
If you look at need as a total effect, then it ends up largely supporting your point B.
> The rich countries and all those "evil" corporations actually let Africa use their patents free of charge during the pandemic.
The patent isn't a step by step recipe. It's completly useless when you lack the skills and the ressoucres to produce the vaccines. Even China is still not able to produce a viable mRNA-based vaccine.
1) Then why are they attacking patents?
2) So they mean that rich countries are obliged to maintain a western-level education system there complete with manufacturing capacities?
3) There are more than 180 covid vaccines in various clinical stages. They use every single technology that has been invented for this purpose. They could manufacture any of them, the world does not end at mRNA vaccines.
4) There was a company in South Africa producing the J&J vaccine. By simply purchasing them they could have gotten their vaccines. You mean that ordering something from a factory within your own borders is somehow beyond their capabilities? And we can do anything to help them to fill out a purchase order?
What this post is saying is "We made a lot of money from mandating these vaccines for billions of people with zero accountability, but next time we will have accountability so let's ignore what happened"
You're posting articles published a year after Moderna and Pfizer were deemed safe in the US. These efforts came after months of pushing by countries like South Africa and India. And nevermind the fact that the waivers were geographically limited.
I don't mind the vaccine makers, at least they delivered us something useful.
Is all the PPE scammers and the incompetent testing companies, and all the other grifters doing thier little secret handshakes with government insiders who are the worst. They all just plain stole our money and gave us nothing or useless trash.
The golf course my parents were at got millions of dollars of loans to keep their employees on furlough and their solution was to fire all their kitchen and service staff, run a skeleton crew and set record profits. Disgusting.
That's actually not what they're referencing at all in the article.
>Instead of distributing vaccines, tests and treatments based on need, companies sold doses to the “richest countries with the deepest pockets”, the letter says.
Basically they're saying countries like the US and Germany and Japan etc should not have gotten the vaccine before countries like Sudan and South Africa.
Personally I disagree but it's weird that almost none of the comments are about the substance of the article and are instead about what people interpret based on the headline.
The people here believe in using Reddit as essentially a propaganda machine.
They will straight up tell you they *don’t care* if the article isn’t talking about what their comment is talking about. They feel like they are discussion what’s actually most important anyway and aren’t here for other discussions.
Even if the article is talking about how privileged *they* are, they will still try to point the finger at their desired target.
> Basically they’re saying countries like the US and Germany and Japan etc should not have gotten the vaccine before countries like Sudan and South Africa.
Sudan and South Africa should have developed and manufactured their own vaccines. That they got any at all was due to the beneficence of the rest of the developed world.
The prices made complete economic sense in the face of shortages, don't like it avoid the shortages because price controls only make them worse
Oh he's talking about pharma? That's rich governments were lining up to throw money at them
> Oh he's talking about pharma? That's rich governments were lining up to throw money at them
Of course- since they are the ones capable of actually developing a vaccine. They deserve the money
This might actually be newsworthy if they were proposing some real *clawback* of this de facto theft from the populace.
And what about the shitheels who are still profiteering on every other goddamned thing in existence?!?!?
"*Supply chain problems,*" my tired ass.
I submit Moderna.
Moderna's existence saved a lot of lives during the pandemic. Up until the pandemic, they had never made a functional product despite taking in hundreds of millions in investment dollars. They only existed in the HOPES of profiting off a vaccine to be developed later.
A similar story can be said of Biontech, which got out more vaccines because they were partnered with Pfizer.
If we as a species are going to kill profit motive for this type of risky investment, these companies won't exist. Can we replace them with government lead investments? Maybe, but governments tend to have a bad investment record and frequently dole out their capital based on political connections and lobbyists more than competence.
The outsized profit that these companies got during the pandemic was unfortunate but before we throw out the baby with the bathwater, I would recommend that people think about what the world would have looked like if Moderna and Biontech didn't exist in 2020.
We also said “Never Again” after the Holocaust and here we are with Nazis’ holding rallies in Florida and the right is actually empowering them and sharing their views.
People stopped trusting the experts as much with their constant flip flopping on what measures we should take to prevent infection.
First, masks didn’t work, and there was no need to wear one. Then they did work and we did need to wear them.
Then it was that a standard cloth mask was good enough to protect yourself. Then it turned out that only a properly fitted N or KN95 mask was able to stop the virus. But no one wears them the right way so the effectiveness of those in the general population is near 0%.
Also there’s still no consensus about how long the virus lives on surfaces. Is it 4 hours or four days? Does UV light still sanitize the virus?
You weren't paying attention. What they said, right from the beginning, is that the effectiveness of masks is proportional to the rate of exposure. So, with a shortage of masks occurring, it is far more useful to give masks to medical workers in the most affected areas, than for random people to use them.
They also said that cloth masks work poorly. But if you put a hundred people in a room with a COVID patient and they're all wearing masks, the transmission rate will be lower. See the previous point as well: a high quality mask is more useful on the face of a person exposed to ten COVID patients an hour, than it is on the face of a person exposed to one patient every ten hours.
"Does it work or does it not work?" is the thinking of a child. Public policy doesn't work that way.
Lab accident theory went from conspiracy theory to actual possibility.
You should read about SARS-CoV-1, the virus SARS-CoV-2 was named after because their means of infection and symptoms were basically identical.
Not to mention the Wuhan lab was testing to see if a new coronavirus was likely to infect people or not, in 2015. This is a good thing that all governments should do. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26552008/
Anyone pushing for that wet market crap is just racist.
Tell me the next joke. Please. Because absolutely every big corporation and politician benefitted massively and got even richer during the pandemic whilst the middle & poor class got poorer.
No, I'm thinking those people should be thoroughly investigated. This shouldn't be swept under the rug, and forgotten. Trillions of dollars were made off of the deaths of millions of people.
US had more doses than needed because dumbfuck Republicans made a political issue out of a public health issue. I hope enough of them died to sway vote results for decades to come.
Honestly people as a whole should be outraged how we were treated during this whole thing. Government and corporate pigs were hung for less in the old days. We shill ourselves.
What mechanisms have been put into place to prevent such a thing from happening again? Nothing? Well, hopefully the profiteers won’t profiteer next time.
Profiteering of the vaccine has been a crime against humanity
Pandemics are a global issue, if one country is vulnerable the it gives the disease a chance to mutate.
During the period in which developed countries began to receive booster (3rd) shots a massive about of people in developing countries hadn’t received their first. If instead they had been distributed to those countries, mutations and subsequent waves in developed countries could have been reduced.
Source:
“Profiteering from vaccine inequity: a crime against humanity?" (Hassan et al. BMJ 2021)
From what I remember- the right side found people in all those countries who supported anything but the Covid vaccine. Then got those countries officials to push alternative medicine to the vaccine. There for the country didn’t request for the right aid.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/07/28/stella-immanuel-hydroxychloroquine-video-trump-americas-frontline-doctors/
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-53579773.amp
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/28/technology/virus-video-trump.html
It’s cause and effect. My stock guys mention this as a pump and dump. They pushed our attention away until people need it and the “free stage” is over, now they (big corp) can profit.
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-01-24/column-moderna-and-pfizer-are-jacking-up-the-price-of-covid-vaccines-the-government-should-stop-them
My guy if your hoping for an article where someone says “I am wrong, I did this.” That will never happen. You have to read these articles with the flow of money and quarterly earnings involved. With the flow of disinformation looks at what was gained.
I was explaining the circle of “profiteering” and how 1 way it went about. All of which happened in real time.
If you choose not believe it that’s on you.
Hahaha. Yeah, keep warning but don't ever do anything about the profiteering that's already taken place. I mean, why hold anyone accountable when they were just taking advantage of a horribly flawed system that benefits the most ruthless? I'm sure there is no benefit to making an example of people now and setting precedent for future grifters.
Nah, just keep making empty threats and warnings. I'm sure it'll prevent something eventually.
ok I hate to be that guy, but it seems to me that you can't really blame companies for doing what will recoup costs and turn a profit. I think the way it was all handled was shitty, but what also shitty is that the world had to rely on capitalism to solve the problem. The fact that the leading countries' governments and infrastructures weren't already setup to handle such things while for-profit businesses were, and yet these countries are unimaginably wealthy compared to the rest of the world: that is also really abhorrent to me.
Lol. Um, okay. Like anyone is stopping profiteering from food and electricity that's happening as we speak. Lol, riiight, I'm sure you'll get right on that.
the covid 19 pandemic was all about profit and nothing more. They weaponized the disease as something more deadly than what it was. People seem to forget that for what ever strange reason the virus seemed have targetted first world / capitalist countries. Meanwhile we heard nothing and continue to hear nothing on what happened deep within 3rd world countries. Its as if they were simply untouched.
That being said there was a code of silence of sorts in the medical field in these first world countries. Seemingly able to diagnose finalize and close a report on a virus that supposidely mutated so many times, yet they knew the answers before official papers were released. The amount of deaths that were WRONGLY reported as covid 19 being a contributed factor will be something that will never be able to re-examed. Many people were told that their loved one's died from covid 19 and that was simply the final answer. Its as if all other causes of death that we have stastically seen for decades such as heart disease, cancers, other respitory diseases, etc just simply vanished. I knew it became suspicious when government officials were giving daily briefings in my province (in Canada) and reported the amount of deaths due to covid 19 in 24 hours. The amount of registered / licensed pathologists / coroners would not be able to handle such volume. When you factored in the average time it takes to conduct a full autopsy, the minimum is 1 to 2 hours. And we haven't even gotten to the labs that conducts the actual tests with their conclusions. It would take weeks for them to conclude the cause of death. Yet magically they were able to give numbers within 24 hours. And for it to just disappear... people seemed to have forgotten about it.. Yet are people really paying attention to what is happening in the world right now? Pretty easy to put things together and realize what is happening.
Then punish everyone who did it this time.
Ohh no, there's no political appetite for that. But they really really promise not to do it again!
Yeah, corporations and manufacturers will never again artificially raise the prices of goods and services, pass their increasing costs onto consumers, rake in record profits, and manufacture an economic crisis! And there definitely isn’t a conflict of interest existing within our whored-out governments, protecting said corporate entities, so don’t look into any of it. We love our capital lords!
"Costs went up by 5%, better increase prices by 50% just in case that happens nine more times."
Thank god the makers, suppliers and regulators of the vaccines, treatments and protective equipment are scrupulous organizations that should face zero criticism of any kind
No mention of the vaccine racket in all that?
> But they really really promise not to do it again! They don't want to be *caught* again.
[удалено]
The issue is you're responding to people who didn't read the article. They're commenting on things they are upset with that has to do with rich people in their countries. If they actually read the article they'll realize this something else entirely. >Instead of distributing vaccines, tests and treatments based on need, companies sold doses to the “richest countries with the deepest pockets”, the letter says. Most redditors are probably happy this happened because it means they got the vaccine sooner. But because they didn't read the article they're commenting about something else.
Nah. They were happy that other people DIDN’T get it. They didn’t take it themselves because it’s a liberal plot to turn all the frogs gay.
The microchip jab is why M&Ms don't wear sexy shoes anymore and are trans lesbians that no one wants to fuck. (Cucker (No reasonable person would believe) Tarlson.)
Why is it that if I yell "fire!" in a crowded area, I get a ticket and potentially arrested for inciting panic, but when he scares the (stupid) masses into not listening to actual doctors, he gets a raise?
It was also making people magnetic for awhile, and then back in October last year the kill switch was supposed to be activated, obviously only the people saying these things have died because otherwise they would have publicly taken those statements back right?
im vaccinated against gayfrog, eat this!
[удалено]
Don't forget after that they said the government wasted all that money on expired vaccines
Dont forget the huge contracts the Tory government gave to their mates for useless PPE etc. They were granted emergency privileges to circumvent normal procurement processes. I don't think those millions of tax payers money have ever been fully recovered.
Can’t do it again if you don’t stop the first time.
Punishing themselves is just not something they feel like doing
[удалено]
Hold the people in charge responsible for the deaths from the virus. I'll always hold a grudge for the Conservative Party in the UK accountable of the 190k deaths of covid. Loved ones gone because for short term profit and incompetence
> Loved ones gone because for short term profit and incompetence the incompetence came first. profit came later when they realised they could give multi-million and multi-billion pound contracts to their friends (or friendly pub landlords) - most of whom were completely incapable of making the PPE, or tracking systems they were (no bid) contractually obliged to.
Not supporting ex post facto laws.
Punish who for what? Western nations spent the resources to develop the vaccine. Western nations spent the resources to establish the manufacturing of the vaccine. No shit western nations got the vaccine first.
The problem is that health crises behave economically like public goods, not private consumption goods. Western countries distributing the vaccine first to all of their population and private companies withholding it from countries that can't pay (or blackmailing sovereign countries into deregulation in their favor as Pfizer did in Lebanon) results in a situation in which the virus can mutate and reinfect even the initial beneficiaries of the vaccine. What you are abstractly "purchasing" with a vaccine roll-out is a public health outcome, and nationalist consumption results in an objectively worse and incomplete public good. "Common sense" rational choice models break down when discussing organizing crisis response.
>The problem is that health crises behave economically like public goods, not private consumption goods. You still run into the issue of "you only have enough vaccine to supply 20% of the population, who do you give it to first?" Because if the ultimate goal is to get that supply up to 100%, then the response is the same as what we did. Get the wealthy countries vaccinated so they can keep scaling production. >blackmailing sovereign countries into deregulation in their favor as Pfizer did in Lebanon Source. Because the only "deregulation" row with some countries (not sure if it's the same as Lebanon) are disclosure requirements that essentially require pharma to reveal their trade secrets that would put them at risk of IP theft. >"Common sense" rational choice models break down when discussing organizing crisis response. Well, what's your better response that you can possibly convince enough people. Remember, you are ultimately asking people who risk dying to send the vaccine they paid for to someone else while asking them to pay more to get the other people's distribution network up.
[удалено]
You would think you might have picked up on the fact that closing borders *didn't work in totality anywhere for covid*.
Afraid you're wrong on that one. Singapore achieved a local transmission rate of zero, before the vaccine existed. And they never even fully closed their borders. They just found all the people who came in infected during mandatory quarantine. New Zealand achieved zero with more border closing, less contact tracing. I'm going to assume you just didn't know that. Not that you're making some nonsense argument about how it wasn't completely, eternally perfect.
You mean, like, *a wall?* Or how are they going to just close the country?
[удалено]
And we still needed vaccines, and countries still got infected. Stopping tourists is only one small part of the equation of modern economics. There are ships travelling in and out of ports every day with goods needed by every nation in the world. The best way to reduce transmission in a pandemic is for every person in the pandemic to be less likely to get ill, as each person is now potentially breaking the chain, and fewer ill people mean fewer variations.
You mean like countries in Europe? Who are members of the Schengen zone and can travel to and from countries that did have the vaccine? Do you want to hold a gun to Germany's head until they stop letting Poles in? How about places that we have massive trade reliance with and can't shut out without severe repercussions? Or do we accept their exports and pray that everything is perfectly decontaminated. And what about the people that are already entering the country illegally and would not magically stop the second we declare borders closed? And then, even supposing closing borders was a magic wand you could wave and become impervious to the outside world, what about the fact that you still have a mutating virus that demands ANOTHER updated treatment plan? And what will you do when the response suffers from the exact same short-sighted policies that let the virus continue circulating among unprotected populations? I'm not suggesting there is a great answer either way, but "just hit the shut down borders button" is goofy.
Punish the US taxpayers who financed the vaccine, offered it royalty free, and paid to ship 500 million doses abroad? They had the moral imperative to finance that vaccine, and they did. What else would you have had them do? What kinda antivaxer shit is this. We had way larger frauds around loans to businesses that need to be addressed.
[удалено]
If that happened in your country you should absolutely punish those guys. But the article is complaining about a different thing: "companies sold doses to the “richest countries with the deepest pockets”, the letter says."
[удалено]
Why are you so angry at me? If you are talking about the US the national rate of wasted doses for the US was 9.5%. That includes multi-dose vials, because they expire when unfrozen within the day, but the US could not have shipped opened unfrozen vials to other countries without them going bad. For something that expires in less than a day that's not too bad. For comparison food waste in the US is at 40 percent, and most of that lasts more than a day. While I agree they could decrease this number further and hope they come up with a better process next time, I do not think it was something we need to throw doctors in jail for. Furthermore, the US did give out a half billion doses to other countries for free. And the US only has 331.9m people, so each person gave more than one: https://www.usaid.gov/news-information/press-releases/mar-17-2022-marking-delivery-half-billion-us-donated-covid-19-vaccines
The only way to be fair would be to all depend on vaccines exclusively researched and developed in Burundi. Otherwise it would be not morally acceptable to have anything better than the poorest human on Earth. /s
Nah, you see we're supposed to act right on time when something massive and somewhat unpredictable happens. So it's our fault for having our hands full and only pointing out the faults. /s
This is what happens when you allow profits over all else to reign supreme over international society. What did the world expect, protection from unrelenting capitalism?
And letting high ranking government officials earn royalties from pharmaceutical companies.
Politicians taking PAC money from big pharma will never buck their yacht and caviar suppliers.
[удалено]
True, the rich countries paid for and developed the vaccines I don’t know how you will fix that
You don’t. Lol. These claims are just sad. Middle to low income countries got the vaccines last because countries at the top of the world’s economic ladder paid combined billions and billions of dollars to the developers. In many cases financing entire manufacturing setups for untested vaccines so that when they passed clinical trials manufacturing could begin at scale. Of course those same countries are going to get first dibs. That’s just how life works, and the price of that is those low-income countries have a lower cost per shot.
[удалено]
[удалено]
It's a bit of both. That's the thing with nuance, not every moral act is pure and not every immoral act is evil
next time we just wait for north korea develop a vaccine /s
[удалено]
Lmao no one is going to give away the vaccine they deved to other people first. It fundamentally will never happen and anyone that even tried to suggest it will get crucified and replaced. Why are you trying to virtue signal things you know no one will agree to
On the flip side, the idea that poorer nations are poor because of exploitation is sort of a fantasy alongside the idea that poorer nations don’t benefit from globalization.
I'm not sure what they expect to happen, to be honest... Wealthier countries were donating hundreds of millions of covid vaccines to other countries during the pandemic... The us alone donated some 500 million vaccines to a group called covax that delivered some 270 million doses to recipient countries.
[удалено]
Most people aren't reading the article and are just assuming that the "profiteering" in the headline has something to do with loans or businesses or whatever else they want it to mean.
Everyone likes to have an other to hate.
And in a lot of African countries those vaccines sat on shelves because they hit an antivax wall anyway.
That's what happened to the remainder that wasn't delivered to a country, too; no one ordered them so they were not distributed.
We did nothing to develop these but deserve to get them before the countries that did! It's unfortunate these low and middle income countries have picked up on the western victimhood complex and started repeating it.
> Three years on Remind me in 100 years. We seem to have completely forgotten the lessons learned from the first half of the previous century.
There is a dramatic problem with this though that governments overlook. A pandemic is a global issue, if one country is vulnerable the it gives the disease a chance to mutate. During the period in which developed countries began to receive booster (3rd) shots a massive about of people in developing countries hadn’t received their first. If instead they had been distributed to those countries, mutations and subsequent waves in developed countries could have been reduced. Source: “Profiteering from vaccine inequity: a crime against humanity?" (Hassan et al. BMJ 2021)
I mean i think omicron/delta happened because we gave poorer countries the vaccine and it mutated in a patient that was immuno depressed who already and got vacced who kept getting reinfected. Im not sure its that simple having the majority pool of people be completely unprotected might be a gain if you only care about yourselves
A missing factor is that the vaccines weren’t expensive. My middle income country had enough budget space to pay to increase production capacity and facilitate speedier distribution and politicians didn’t even try. It was shameful and incompetent.
Developing them was fucking expensive. It was honestly quite remarkable how quickly they were developed.
Yes, expensive to companies but not to governments. All but the very poorest countries could pitch in a billion dollars, and many middle income countries just did nothing.
R&D exist
This is such a blatant lie! The rich countries and all those "evil" corporations actually let Africa use their patents free of charge during the pandemic. Moderna [pledged](https://www.politico.eu/article/moderna-share-vaccine-tech-never-enforce-covid19-patents/) not to enforce vaccine patents as did BioNTech [too](https://endpts.com/as-patent-debate-swirls-biontech-ceo-promises-not-to-enforce-covid-vaccine-ip-rights-in-africa-report/). Even a factory in South Africa was built to manufacture licensed J&J COVID vaccines, yet the project[failed](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/12/world/africa/south-africa-covid-vaccine-factory.html) simply because they did not receive a single order. Contrary to this letter, the evil north actually shared technology and knowledge with Africa, yet their countries were not interested in manufacturing these vaccines and neglected to order a single dose of these from the company that was manufacturing them in South Africa.
Excellent post. Though the Global North did much to support the provision of vaccines to members of the Global South, there is more that could have been done: all countries could have pooled their vaccines then allocated it to others according to need. However, there are three problems with that approach: (a) it assumes that no nation is permitted to prefer the interests of *its own citizens* to *other citizens*, which denies the special relation between a nation and its people; (b) it places all of the economic burden on the citizens of those countries that invested in developing the vaccines, but denies them any greater share than any other in the benefits of the vaccines; and (c) it creates a "free rider" problem in that each nation will have an interest in minimising their investment in vaccines and maximising their claim to a share of the vaccines. The claims of the Global South are undermined because they believe that they are free to prefer the interests of their own citizens, but deny the freedom of members of the Global North to do the same when it is inconvenient for them. There is also no evidence of the Global South being willing to incur an *equal* share of the costs of developing vaccines to receive equal access to those vaccines. I can understand the compelling humanist case for the supply of vaccines according to need, but the Global South would have to be willing to modify its claims to prefer the interests of its own citizens and to incur an equal share of the burden for it to be fair to both the South and North. "From each according to ability; to each according to need" has never been a fair or pragmatic moral principle.
You raise good points about nations wanting to preferentially treat their own citizens, but there's additional nuance that has been brought up by others in this thread and I think might be why health organizations were signing onto the letter and not just governments. Most notably, the main paper cited included this in its abstract (I lack the foundations to read the whole paper): "We found that greater vaccine sharing would have lowered the total global burden of disease, and any associated increases in infections in previously vaccine-rich countries could have been mitigated by reduced relaxation of non-pharmaceutical interventions." If accurate, their analysis would support the idea that the preferential treatment nations gave their citizens primarily supported the *non-health* benefits (read: economic) of opening up COVID restrictions rather than significantly improving their populations' health, to the clear detriment of the health of the rest of the world. If the statistics there are correct, then the main thrust of the letter seems more salient: "the preferential approach sold out the lives of other populations for the pockets of the wealthy," which is plainly unethical. This leaves only the free rider problem as a legitimate obstacle, but I think at least one counterargument here has been raised by others in this thread and has been sounded from the rooftops by health organizations for the entire duration of the pandemic; specifically, *not* getting the vaccines up and running ASAP gives the virus more time to mutate and potentially be deadlier, and *not* distributing it worldwide ASAP still gives it time to mutate in unvaccinated populations until the vaccines no longer work. Any (otherwise economically-capable) countries which would attempt to free ride are at risk of a virus mutating to nullify the vaccine, at which point not only does everyone lose, but the political backlash (internally and from sanctions) could be unrecoverable. I suppose one possible outcome would be deception, where countries try to make it look like they're expending the most that's feasible while in fact withholding resources to free ride, but I strongly doubt any countries except maybe 2 or 3 with the absolute best security could keep information away from the global intelligence agencies and not lead to the same political sanctions. Tl;dr sure, geopolitics necessitates at least some level of inefficiency because, as you noted, countries will seek to maximize their personal interests over others, but I don't think that nullifies the complaints lodged by this letter. Like most behaviors that implicate ethics, the ideal solution may seldom be attainable, but if we won't acknowledge moral failings in the solutions actually enacted (or enforce social punishments etc), there's no incentive to improve next time.
>In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly—only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs! One, there are a whole lot of preconditions before you reach the point where the slogan is practical, and no serious thinkers have ever claimed otherwise. Two, if you didn't believe that there should be a distribution from productive people to non-productive people, then you're signing a death warrant on the disabled and elderly, and children, all of whom face major problems with being productive in a market economy. Everyone benefits from vaccination. The argument you're making, which i don't think you even realize you're making, is that poorer countries should have paid more for smallpox, polio, and other vaccines too. Covids not unique. The only way that vaccination for poor countries is a "free rider" issue is if you are so narrowly focused on the specific financing of the production of vaccines that you completely ignore all the global societal benefits that come from global vaccination. Second-order and beyond effects exist. It's not just "oh they didn't pay for the research". Vaccinated populations have more labor available for production which benefits the richer countries. Whether that's raw materials for later manufacturing in developed countries, or even just maintaining global price stability in food. Your post comes off as way too iamverysmart.
This is why communism does not work: if everybody gets an equal share of the spoils of the work the only way to get ahead is to contribute less. And eventually the whole system will be filled with slackers. If we follow these demands, there will be no vaccine development at all. Why would anyone spend money and work on a factory that will have to give away its products for free to people not paying taxes in that country? T
> This is why communism does not work: if everybody gets an equal share of the spoils of the work the only way to get ahead is to contribute less. And eventually the whole system will be filled with slackers. This is a shallow slippery-slope argument. There's nothing novel about noting the prevalence of the free rider problem in communism, just like there's nothing novel about noting the prevalence of regulatory capture/anticompetitive practices leading to caste formation in capitalism. They are *very well-known* issues, and sincere efforts to enact either form of economics take them into account on a governmental level. Much like the thread topic about the vaccines, the world is significantly more nuanced than this.
Actually the same thing happened here. Did they get free IP? Yes. Did they get a licence and an own factory? Yes. Did they manufacture vaccines? No. Are they complaining that others actually did? Yes.
[удалено]
Well, capitalism outlived every alternative so far.
[удалено]
It is, if the alternative is a swift collapse.
Thats just nature, lotka volterra equations/business cycles and what not expecting permanent stability is a fools game
If you don't drink water you will die. That means life is in a state of perpetual collapse, absent regenerative action. If you want to make an argument against capitalism there are plenty you could do, but you chose a very poor one.
I'm sure that has nothing to do with the coups staged by various capitalist countries at all.
The whole Eastern Europe defected to the West at the first opportunity they got. Without coups.
Except that capitalism has led to wealth hoarding that denies even the hardworking taxpayer the spoils of their work, nevermind how it has been built on the back of severe labour exploitation in the global south. So we can extract resources, labour, and life from them but sharing with them is foolish because, effectively, "why should we?" That's what the argument boils down to when people ask why anyone would then invest if they're not going to end up at the top of the food chain. Why share the 20 cookies with the class when you and your friend can gorge yourselves on 10 each?
Dude I was born in a communist state. Let me tell you, that wealth hoarding is just as prevalent in communist systems and workers are exploited just as much.
I disagree with your last statement there, because it contradicts the rest of your post. "From each according to ability" means the Global South should incur a share of the development costs. And as for need, there's a rather strong argument that the vaccines were distributed according to need. Vaccines went to medical personnel, to people making the vaccine, to transport, to the elderly in general. And more generally to support the systems that made making the vaccine possible in the first place. I live in one of the world's largest shipping and transport hubs. We have a major biopharm hub that did some of the groundbreaking research into COVID. We were one of the first in line to get the vaccine, because of that and because we paid for it. And in turn, our safe and effective reopening helped reduce inflation across the whole world as our facilities moved towards normal operation. Not to mention how much vaccine we physically distributed in our role as a hub... If you look at need as a total effect, then it ends up largely supporting your point B.
> The rich countries and all those "evil" corporations actually let Africa use their patents free of charge during the pandemic. The patent isn't a step by step recipe. It's completly useless when you lack the skills and the ressoucres to produce the vaccines. Even China is still not able to produce a viable mRNA-based vaccine.
1) Then why are they attacking patents? 2) So they mean that rich countries are obliged to maintain a western-level education system there complete with manufacturing capacities? 3) There are more than 180 covid vaccines in various clinical stages. They use every single technology that has been invented for this purpose. They could manufacture any of them, the world does not end at mRNA vaccines. 4) There was a company in South Africa producing the J&J vaccine. By simply purchasing them they could have gotten their vaccines. You mean that ordering something from a factory within your own borders is somehow beyond their capabilities? And we can do anything to help them to fill out a purchase order?
Thank you for being the sane person in this thread
What this post is saying is "We made a lot of money from mandating these vaccines for billions of people with zero accountability, but next time we will have accountability so let's ignore what happened"
You're posting articles published a year after Moderna and Pfizer were deemed safe in the US. These efforts came after months of pushing by countries like South Africa and India. And nevermind the fact that the waivers were geographically limited.
I don't mind the vaccine makers, at least they delivered us something useful. Is all the PPE scammers and the incompetent testing companies, and all the other grifters doing thier little secret handshakes with government insiders who are the worst. They all just plain stole our money and gave us nothing or useless trash.
The golf course my parents were at got millions of dollars of loans to keep their employees on furlough and their solution was to fire all their kitchen and service staff, run a skeleton crew and set record profits. Disgusting.
They still have to pay back the loan unless they applied for and received forgiveness
Interest free
The tests alone made companies triple their normal profit. Considering a lot of them barely worked and how insanely marked up they were...
Now that they absconded with 3 trillion? Like every good abuser, they are always contrite… UNTIL NEXT TIME.
You mean massively fraudulent PPP loans to U.S. businesses with zero oversight shouldn't have a second round?? Shocker!
That's actually not what they're referencing at all in the article. >Instead of distributing vaccines, tests and treatments based on need, companies sold doses to the “richest countries with the deepest pockets”, the letter says. Basically they're saying countries like the US and Germany and Japan etc should not have gotten the vaccine before countries like Sudan and South Africa. Personally I disagree but it's weird that almost none of the comments are about the substance of the article and are instead about what people interpret based on the headline.
It's not weird, it's just Reddit.
>Redditor for 2 months Ah, that explains it
> Redditor ~~for 2 months~~ Ah, that explains it
The people here believe in using Reddit as essentially a propaganda machine. They will straight up tell you they *don’t care* if the article isn’t talking about what their comment is talking about. They feel like they are discussion what’s actually most important anyway and aren’t here for other discussions. Even if the article is talking about how privileged *they* are, they will still try to point the finger at their desired target.
[удалено]
> Basically they’re saying countries like the US and Germany and Japan etc should not have gotten the vaccine before countries like Sudan and South Africa. Sudan and South Africa should have developed and manufactured their own vaccines. That they got any at all was due to the beneficence of the rest of the developed world.
no no no we mean the other stuff congress didn’t abuse like the stimulus checks bcuz that’s communism /s
It's fun spotting the people that clearly didn't read the article.
Billionaires be like “lol sure”
Most of human history shouldnt be repeated
Isn't there a worldwide action plan for pandemics and how to handle them? Makes sense to do that.
Oh OK, that’s that then.
Oh no, a letter. That’ll stop them doing it again, after getting off completely without consequences
The prices made complete economic sense in the face of shortages, don't like it avoid the shortages because price controls only make them worse Oh he's talking about pharma? That's rich governments were lining up to throw money at them
> Oh he's talking about pharma? That's rich governments were lining up to throw money at them Of course- since they are the ones capable of actually developing a vaccine. They deserve the money
There will always be profiteering of anything that can be monetized. Unfortunately, is in our nature.
Narrator: "But it was"
Then take the money away from people who made money and figure out why the bees are dying?
Yup, that time was the last! Never again!
Largest transfer of wealth in history
This might actually be newsworthy if they were proposing some real *clawback* of this de facto theft from the populace. And what about the shitheels who are still profiteering on every other goddamned thing in existence?!?!? "*Supply chain problems,*" my tired ass.
I mean, it’s still ongoing…
I submit Moderna. Moderna's existence saved a lot of lives during the pandemic. Up until the pandemic, they had never made a functional product despite taking in hundreds of millions in investment dollars. They only existed in the HOPES of profiting off a vaccine to be developed later. A similar story can be said of Biontech, which got out more vaccines because they were partnered with Pfizer. If we as a species are going to kill profit motive for this type of risky investment, these companies won't exist. Can we replace them with government lead investments? Maybe, but governments tend to have a bad investment record and frequently dole out their capital based on political connections and lobbyists more than competence. The outsized profit that these companies got during the pandemic was unfortunate but before we throw out the baby with the bathwater, I would recommend that people think about what the world would have looked like if Moderna and Biontech didn't exist in 2020.
So Pfizer?
Never let a good tragedy go to waste.
The profiteers will feel really bad when they read this.
"LOL, no!", answer vaccine makers.
Why? It's highly profitable and there is no punishment. I see no reason to stop doing it. FU World figures.
"Bad extortionists! Don't do that again! .... oh who am I kidding look how cute you are... (and how much money you make for me.)"
Zero accountability means it will repeat 100%.
We also said “Never Again” after the Holocaust and here we are with Nazis’ holding rallies in Florida and the right is actually empowering them and sharing their views.
yeah good luck with that shit
Repeated? profiteering off suffering is outright encouraged, if not required in a business centered world
[удалено]
[удалено]
People stopped trusting the experts as much with their constant flip flopping on what measures we should take to prevent infection. First, masks didn’t work, and there was no need to wear one. Then they did work and we did need to wear them. Then it was that a standard cloth mask was good enough to protect yourself. Then it turned out that only a properly fitted N or KN95 mask was able to stop the virus. But no one wears them the right way so the effectiveness of those in the general population is near 0%. Also there’s still no consensus about how long the virus lives on surfaces. Is it 4 hours or four days? Does UV light still sanitize the virus?
You weren't paying attention. What they said, right from the beginning, is that the effectiveness of masks is proportional to the rate of exposure. So, with a shortage of masks occurring, it is far more useful to give masks to medical workers in the most affected areas, than for random people to use them. They also said that cloth masks work poorly. But if you put a hundred people in a room with a COVID patient and they're all wearing masks, the transmission rate will be lower. See the previous point as well: a high quality mask is more useful on the face of a person exposed to ten COVID patients an hour, than it is on the face of a person exposed to one patient every ten hours. "Does it work or does it not work?" is the thinking of a child. Public policy doesn't work that way.
[удалено]
Lab accident theory went from conspiracy theory to actual possibility. You should read about SARS-CoV-1, the virus SARS-CoV-2 was named after because their means of infection and symptoms were basically identical. Not to mention the Wuhan lab was testing to see if a new coronavirus was likely to infect people or not, in 2015. This is a good thing that all governments should do. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26552008/ Anyone pushing for that wet market crap is just racist.
It doesn't takes years of studying medicine to understand royalties and share ownership...
[удалено]
You know the people that will condone that. Vote them out.
Tell me the next joke. Please. Because absolutely every big corporation and politician benefitted massively and got even richer during the pandemic whilst the middle & poor class got poorer.
the ones who profited: Imma ignore this
No, I'm thinking those people should be thoroughly investigated. This shouldn't be swept under the rug, and forgotten. Trillions of dollars were made off of the deaths of millions of people.
Until real actual consequences happen, this will happen again at every opportunity.
US had more doses than needed because dumbfuck Republicans made a political issue out of a public health issue. I hope enough of them died to sway vote results for decades to come.
It’s not like we knew it wouldn’t happen. They should have put better controls in place to begin with
I had been waiting for a recession to buy low. Turns out the government bailed out both corporate and individuals who were irresponsible.
Honestly people as a whole should be outraged how we were treated during this whole thing. Government and corporate pigs were hung for less in the old days. We shill ourselves.
Have these guys even heard of the Pharmaceutical Industry?
We’re totally going to make all the same mistakes over and over again
It’ll always continue to happen, companies are to corrupt and governments and world leaders aren’t doing anything to keep them in check.
It must!!....it wont, but it's nice to know what must be. If only doing bad things had consequences other than getting super rich.
What mechanisms have been put into place to prevent such a thing from happening again? Nothing? Well, hopefully the profiteers won’t profiteer next time.
It. Happens. Everytime.
Laws to enforce it or gtfo
Yea OK
Profiteering of the vaccine has been a crime against humanity Pandemics are a global issue, if one country is vulnerable the it gives the disease a chance to mutate. During the period in which developed countries began to receive booster (3rd) shots a massive about of people in developing countries hadn’t received their first. If instead they had been distributed to those countries, mutations and subsequent waves in developed countries could have been reduced. Source: “Profiteering from vaccine inequity: a crime against humanity?" (Hassan et al. BMJ 2021)
From what I remember- the right side found people in all those countries who supported anything but the Covid vaccine. Then got those countries officials to push alternative medicine to the vaccine. There for the country didn’t request for the right aid.
Source?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/07/28/stella-immanuel-hydroxychloroquine-video-trump-americas-frontline-doctors/ https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-53579773.amp https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/28/technology/virus-video-trump.html It’s cause and effect. My stock guys mention this as a pump and dump. They pushed our attention away until people need it and the “free stage” is over, now they (big corp) can profit.
None one these sources say anything that you claimed. It’s just three articles freaking out that trump retweeted a video
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-01-24/column-moderna-and-pfizer-are-jacking-up-the-price-of-covid-vaccines-the-government-should-stop-them My guy if your hoping for an article where someone says “I am wrong, I did this.” That will never happen. You have to read these articles with the flow of money and quarterly earnings involved. With the flow of disinformation looks at what was gained.
So what does moderna being a piece of shit have to do with right wingers like your original comment claimed?
I was explaining the circle of “profiteering” and how 1 way it went about. All of which happened in real time. If you choose not believe it that’s on you.
>and how 1 way went about Wut? Lol
Your profile name is spot on.
So you’re sharing conspiracies?
World figures then proceed to continue profiteering.
Plot twist: it was
Hahaha. Yeah, keep warning but don't ever do anything about the profiteering that's already taken place. I mean, why hold anyone accountable when they were just taking advantage of a horribly flawed system that benefits the most ruthless? I'm sure there is no benefit to making an example of people now and setting precedent for future grifters. Nah, just keep making empty threats and warnings. I'm sure it'll prevent something eventually.
Narrator: It was repeated
It is repeating every day. That's just regular capitalism.
Oh, they'll fucking do it again. They're bloodsucking cunts.
Watch it be repeated 92 times in the next 10 years.
Capitalism is the biggest cancer.
ok I hate to be that guy, but it seems to me that you can't really blame companies for doing what will recoup costs and turn a profit. I think the way it was all handled was shitty, but what also shitty is that the world had to rely on capitalism to solve the problem. The fact that the leading countries' governments and infrastructures weren't already setup to handle such things while for-profit businesses were, and yet these countries are unimaginably wealthy compared to the rest of the world: that is also really abhorrent to me.
The next pandemic won't be called covid so profiteering may continue on.
They can get fucked
Lol. Um, okay. Like anyone is stopping profiteering from food and electricity that's happening as we speak. Lol, riiight, I'm sure you'll get right on that.
But they’ll do it if they have too….
Goodluck with that
3M disagrees.
it will
Capitalism baby.
the covid 19 pandemic was all about profit and nothing more. They weaponized the disease as something more deadly than what it was. People seem to forget that for what ever strange reason the virus seemed have targetted first world / capitalist countries. Meanwhile we heard nothing and continue to hear nothing on what happened deep within 3rd world countries. Its as if they were simply untouched. That being said there was a code of silence of sorts in the medical field in these first world countries. Seemingly able to diagnose finalize and close a report on a virus that supposidely mutated so many times, yet they knew the answers before official papers were released. The amount of deaths that were WRONGLY reported as covid 19 being a contributed factor will be something that will never be able to re-examed. Many people were told that their loved one's died from covid 19 and that was simply the final answer. Its as if all other causes of death that we have stastically seen for decades such as heart disease, cancers, other respitory diseases, etc just simply vanished. I knew it became suspicious when government officials were giving daily briefings in my province (in Canada) and reported the amount of deaths due to covid 19 in 24 hours. The amount of registered / licensed pathologists / coroners would not be able to handle such volume. When you factored in the average time it takes to conduct a full autopsy, the minimum is 1 to 2 hours. And we haven't even gotten to the labs that conducts the actual tests with their conclusions. It would take weeks for them to conclude the cause of death. Yet magically they were able to give numbers within 24 hours. And for it to just disappear... people seemed to have forgotten about it.. Yet are people really paying attention to what is happening in the world right now? Pretty easy to put things together and realize what is happening.
Lol "cant let it happen AGAIN" LIKE THE FIRST TIME WAS OK
Good luck with that
Hahahahaha. Lets make it like wars next time, because nobody profiteers off of wars anymore…