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Vaccines

Texas Team Applauded For Giving What Big Pharma Refuses

January 2, 2022 Brett Wilkins, Common Dreams. , , ,
A small team of Texas researchers is being hailed for developing an unpatented Covid-19 vaccine to share with the world without personal profit, with some advocates asking, if they can do it, why can't Big Pharma? Dubbed "the World's Covid vaccine," the inoculation—formally called Cobervax—is an open-source alternative to Big Pharma's patent-protected vaccines. Instead of being produced for profit, this shot could ultimately be manufactured around the world and made cheaply available to all without governmental or private legal retribution. Common Dreams reported this week that Cobervax—developed jointly by Texas Children's Hospital, Houston's Baylor College, and the Indian pharmaceutical company Biological E. Limited—was authorized for emergency use in India amid a surge in infections driven by the highly contagious Omicron variant.

The Dangerous Misuse Of ‘Natural Immunity’ Against Covid Vaccination

December 19, 2021 Joshua Cho, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. , , ,
One particularly pernicious myth going around in the US is the notion that “natural immunity,” gained from contracting Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus SARS-CoV-2, is preferable to getting vaccinated. One prominent politician, Sen. Rand Paul (R.–Ky.), has declared that he refuses to get vaccinated, because of his belief that he has “natural immunity” since he’s “already had the disease” (Slate, 5/23/21). Now, the Republican Party is officially embracing its position as the anti-vaccine political party, advocating what they call “natural immunity” as an alternative or substitute to getting vaccinated, as the Associated Press (11/21/21) reported: Republicans fighting President Joe Biden’s coronavirus vaccine mandates are wielding a new weapon against the White House rules: natural immunity.

Carers Of The World Vs. Covid-19 Criminals

November 29, 2021 Varsha Gandikota-nellutla, Progressive International. , , ,
As we enter the third year of the Covid-19 crisis, two battles are underway. One is led by the carers of the world in overcrowded hospitals, fighting to end the pandemic. Another is by corporate executives in closed boardrooms, fighting to prolong it. The question at the very center of both is this — who will control medical recipes worth billions of dollars, and millions of lives? As some countries roll out booster programs, less than 6% of Africa’s more than a billion people have been fully inoculated. Big pharmaceutical companies are letting the pandemic go on — and why not, according to a recent estimate, Pfizer is expected to make astronomical profits —$107bn in cumulative sales by the end of 2022 on its Covid-19 vaccines, now being dubbed a “megablockbuster.”

Health Advocates Bring Pile Of Bones To Biden Chief Of Staff, Moderna CEO

October 1, 2021 Leandra Bernstein, ABC. , , ,
Washington — Activists gathered outside the homes of the White House chief of staff and the CEO of Moderna to demand the Biden administration and private drug companies do more to address the global vaccine shortage. "Really, we're bringing attention to the fact that both Moderna and the U.S. government have been completely inadequate in scaling up vaccine access globally," James Krellenstein, co-founder of the AIDS advocacy group, PrEP4All told Sinclair Broadcast Group. Activists with PrEP4All, Health GAP, the Global Health Justice Partnership and experts in epidemiology and global health joined the protests which were staged simultaneously at White House chief of staff Ron Klain's house in Chevy Chase, Md. and Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel's home in Cambridge, Mass.

Marxist Epidemiologist Calls Bullsh*t On Antivaxxers

September 20, 2021 Rania Khalek, BreakThrough News. , , ,
Anti-scientific conspiracy theories are spreading, not just among the right, but even even among some segments of the left. To address this issue from a Marxist perspective, Rania Khalek spoke with Rob Wallace, an evolutionary epidemiologist at the Agroecology and Rural Economics Research Corps in St. Paul and author of “Dead Epidemiologists: On the Origins of COVID-19.” Rania asks "How do we as leftists deal with the fact that the pharmaceutical industry is the one that has the infrastructure to really rapidly produce these vaccines even if they're motivated by profit and not public good but at the same time they are making a massive profit? How do we deal with that contradiction?"

Open Letter By Cuban Scientists To Biden

August 14, 2021 Prensa Latina. , , ,
You recently referred to Cuba at a White House saying: 'I would be prepared to give significant amounts of vaccines if… an international organization would administer those vaccines and do it in a way that average citizens would have access to those vaccines.' You also called Cuba a 'failed state'. These statements surprised many, including those in the U.S. who have first-hand exposure to Cuba's health system. They also rankled with frontline Cuban health workers risking their lives to contain the COVID epidemic in our country. They do not reflect Cuban reality, and we deplore that disinformation by malicious political players is influencing your policy decisions. As scientists, doctors, and concerned citizens, we believe it's worth fact-checking three assumptions implicit in what you said.

Only International Solidarity Can Defeat Covid For Good

July 19, 2021 Nivedita Majumdar, Tribune Magazine. , , ,
In early March of this year, I was in a hospital bed in Delhi for a week following a Covid diagnosis. This was just about four weeks before the second wave hit the country, showcasing the dystopic deadliness of the virus. It was strangely calm at that time with fewer than ten Covid patients at the facility; the same hospital was recently treating close to 400. I’d occasionally chat with the nurses who recalled the ‘Covid times’ earlier in the year when each nurse had to attend to up to a dozen patients at a time. But thankfully that, they said, was in the past; the virus had been controlled. Later, I thought of those nurses and how in a mere few weeks their lives had been upended, of the nightmare they were living through. How many patients were they attending to during the latest peak: 25, 30, 40? Were they themselves OK? Not all of them had been vaccinated.

The Drug Companies Are Killing People

July 19, 2021 Center For Economic and Policy Research. , , ,
After the Biden administration indicated its support for this limited waiver, many other rich countries signed on as well. Germany, under longtime chancellor Angela Merkel, has been largely left alone to carry water for the pharmaceutical industry in opposing the vaccine waiver. I had the chance to confront the industry arguments directly last week in a web panel sponsored by the International Association for the Protection of Intellectual Property (link included when it becomes available). It’s always educational to see these arguments up close and real people actually making them. The first line of defense is that the waiver of patent rights by itself does not lead to any increase in vaccine production. This is of course true. Vaccines have to be manufactured, eliminating patent rights is not the same thing as manufacturing vaccines.

Black People’s Reasons For Not Getting Vaccinated Are Much Deeper

July 11, 2021 Elisa J. Sobo, Diana Schow, and Stephanie McClure, News One. , , ,
By early July 2021, nearly two-thirds of all U.S. residents 12 years and older had received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine; 55% were fully vaccinated. But uptake varies drastically by region – and it is lower on average among non-white people. Many blame the relatively lower vaccination rates in communities of color on “vaccine hesitancy.” But this label overlooks persistent barriers to access and lumps together the varied reasons people have for refraining from vaccination. It also places all the responsibility for getting vaccinated on individuals. Ultimately, homogenizing peoples’ reasons for not getting vaccinated diverts attention away from social factors that research shows play a critical role in health status and outcomes.

Cuba’s Vaccine Shield And The Five Monopolies That Structure The World

July 2, 2021 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. , , ,
In 1869, at the age of fifteen, José Martí and his young friends published a magazine in Cuba called La Patria Libre (‘The Free Homeland’), which adopted a strong position against Spanish imperialism. The first and only issue of the magazine carried Martí’s poem, ‘Abdala’. The poem is about a young man, Abdala, who goes off to fight against all odds to free his native land, which Martí calls Nubia. ‘Neither laurels nor crowns are needed for those who breathe courage’, Martí wrote. ‘Let us run to the fight … to war, valiant ones’. And in the rousing address by Abdala, comes these lyrical words: Let the warlike valour of our souls Serve you, my homeland, as a shield. Martí was arrested and sentenced to six years of hard labour.

Vaccine Billionaires Show Why Medicine Can’t Be Left To The Market

June 21, 2021 Beauty Dhlamini, Tribune Magazine. , , ,
Monopoly medicine has allowed for the normalisation of a neoliberal approach in an arena it should never have penetrated: global health. As a result of pandemic profits, a wave of new billionaires has emerged – in stark contrast with the destitution faced elsewhere, and with the disturbing persisting inequality to access which is quickly becoming a vaccine apartheid. Since the beginning of the pandemic, nine new people have become billionaires off vaccine fortunes, with a combined net wealth of $19.3 billion (£13.6 billion). According to the People’s Vaccine Alliance, between them, their net worth is enough to fully vaccinate all people in low-income countries 1.3 times over. The Alliance, comprised of nine NGOs including Amnesty International, Oxfam, and UNAIDS, has led campaigns against this wealth proliferation following their analysis of Forbes Rich List data...

On Contact: Virus

June 20, 2021 Chris Hedges, RT. , , ,
On the show this week, Chris Hedges discusses the coronavirus with investigative journalist and author, Nina Burleigh. “There are many ways to begin to tell the story of why more Americans died of Covid-19, the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2, than in any other nation on earth,” Nina Burleigh writes in her new book ‘Virus: Vaccinations, the CDC and the Hijacking of America's Response to the Pandemic’. “We could start at the Washington, DC hospital with doctors amputating the lower leg of the White House chief of security, a man who caught Covid in Donald Trump's mask-free domain. Or we could talk to the families of forty-six veterans who died within days of each other in a Veterans Administration nursing home in Alabama.

A Temporary TRIPS Waiver Is Not Enough

May 7, 2021 Progressive International. , , ,
A new poll finds that 59% percent of US voters support waiving all patent protections to produce generic versions of life-saving medicines for critical diseases, from Covid-19 and HIV/AIDS, to heart disease and diabetes. Only 28% disagreed. The survey carried out by Data for Progress and the Progressive International, shows a super majority of 71% registered Democrats support the removal of all patent barriers to allow for the cheaper production of life-saving medicines. Even registered Republicans support the action with 47% in favor compared to 39% opposed.

Biden Supports Suspension Of Covid-19 Vaccine Patents

May 6, 2021 Telesur English. , , ,
President Joe Biden's administration on Wednesday supported a proposal submitted by several countries to the World Trade Organization (WTO) to suspend the intellectual property of vaccines against covid-19 when the United States has already administered 250 million doses. The announcement was greeted with sharp falls in the shares of the pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and BioNTech and Moderna and Novavax on the Wall Street stock exchange. Biden made good on his campaign promise to endorse the patent suspension. Still, he has only done so when the U.S. vaccination rate plummets, and the country is sitting on tens of millions of doses yet to be administered.

Biden Chooses Monopoly Profits Over Lives In India

May 2, 2021 Sam Carliner, Left Voice. , , ,
India is prominent in the news right now, as it has become the epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic worldwide. Rhetoric from the Biden administration might lead people to believe that resolving the crisis in India is a top priority. As thousands of people die each day in India and the United States restricts all travel from the country, however, it turns out  that Biden’s support for vaccine nationalism is fueling the crisis. Biden has promised aid to India in the form of personal protective equipment (PPE), ventilators, test kits, and other supplies — but without vaccines, that essentially slaps a band-aid on the problem. There are two actions the United States could take, though, that would make a serious dent in the spread of the pandemic in India.
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