Democratic Reps. Scott Peters and Ron Kind pushing to make COVID vaccine less acceptable

Huffington Post

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Two House Democrats are soliciting support for a letter calling on President Joe Biden to continue denying developing countries’ request for a temporary waiver from intellectual property rules that severely limit their ability to mass produce COVID-19 vaccines developed in the United States and Europe.

The Democrats, Reps. Scott Peters of California and Ron Kind of Wisconsin, were both among Congress’ top 25 recipients of contributions from pharmaceutical industry political action committees in the 2020 election cycle.

A draft of their letter, which is backed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a powerful big business lobby, uses pharmaceutical industry talking points to argue for preserving a status quo that many experts believe could cost the world countless lives and squander a narrow window for achieving global herd immunity.

“We remain concerned ... about proposals from India and South Africa to push the World Trade Organization (WTO) Council for Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) to waive critical intellectual property provisions of the TRIPS Agreement regarding COVID response,” the draft states. “While we agree with the parties’ purported objectives of expanding distribution as rapidly as possible, we believe eliminating those protections would not advance that goal and may even serve to delay global distribution of vaccines.”

The draft praises Biden for refusing to grant the waiver thus far and claims that acceding to developing countries’ demands would actually jeopardize global efforts to manufacture 10 billion vaccine doses by the end of this year.

“We are concerned that diverting resources to build, staff, and equip a new supply chain would serve only to disrupt the progress already made in building the global capacity to vaccinate every adult worldwide,” it states. “Further, intellectual property protections have hastened the development of new COVID vaccines and treatments in record time, and they have also allowed for the sharing of technology and information to scale up vaccine manufacturing to meet global needs.”

Several of the claims in the letter are dubious.

Publicly funded research has played as big a role as intellectual property protections, if not bigger, in the development of the COVID-19 vaccines. Pfizer and Biontech developed their vaccine with the help of funding from the German government. And both Moderna and Johnson & Johnson received billions of dollars in research and development aid from the U.S. government.

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History will not be kind to us for this. Between this and fricking up the global supply lines (which the UN has said may kill/have killed 130 million people), this is a huge level of heartlessness. But hey, one life. They’re trying to continue this pandemic as long as possible at the expense of your liberty and millions of lives. frick these people.