World Health Leaders Stress Need For Sharing of Vaccines (theguardian.com) 127
Long-time Slashdot reader tomtermite shares a report from The Guardian:
Ministers and officials from every nation will meet via video link on Monday for the annual world health assembly, which is expected to be dominated by efforts to stop rich countries monopolising drugs and future vaccines against Covid-19... The leaders of Italy, France, Germany and Norway, together with the European commission and council, called earlier this month for any innovative tools, therapeutics or vaccines to be shared equally and fairly.
"If we can develop a vaccine that is produced by the world, for the whole world, this will be a unique global public good of the 21st century," they said in a statement.
The sole resolution before the assembly this year is an EU proposal for a voluntary patent pool. Drug and vaccine companies would then be under pressure to give up the monopoly that patents allow them on their inventions, which means they can charge high prices, so that all countries can make or buy affordable versions. In the weeks of negotiations leading up to the meeting, which is scheduled to last for less than a day, there has been a dispute over the language of the resolution. Countries with major pharmaceutical companies argue they need patents to guarantee sufficiently high prices in wealthy nations to recoup their research and development costs....
Oxfam's health policy manager, Anna Marriott, said: "This week's letter calling for a people's vaccine, which was signed by more than 140 world leaders and experts, sets the bar for the scale of ambition we need to meet the challenge before us...." [Research charity] Wellcome published a poll on Sunday of 2,000 people in the UK which found 96% supported the idea that national governments should work together to ensure that treatments and vaccines can be manufactured in as many countries as possible and distributed globally to everyone who needs them.
"We need vaccines and treatments that will work for the world, and any advances must be available to all countries equally, without exception," said Alex Harris, the head of global policy at Wellcome.
"If we can develop a vaccine that is produced by the world, for the whole world, this will be a unique global public good of the 21st century," they said in a statement.
The sole resolution before the assembly this year is an EU proposal for a voluntary patent pool. Drug and vaccine companies would then be under pressure to give up the monopoly that patents allow them on their inventions, which means they can charge high prices, so that all countries can make or buy affordable versions. In the weeks of negotiations leading up to the meeting, which is scheduled to last for less than a day, there has been a dispute over the language of the resolution. Countries with major pharmaceutical companies argue they need patents to guarantee sufficiently high prices in wealthy nations to recoup their research and development costs....
Oxfam's health policy manager, Anna Marriott, said: "This week's letter calling for a people's vaccine, which was signed by more than 140 world leaders and experts, sets the bar for the scale of ambition we need to meet the challenge before us...." [Research charity] Wellcome published a poll on Sunday of 2,000 people in the UK which found 96% supported the idea that national governments should work together to ensure that treatments and vaccines can be manufactured in as many countries as possible and distributed globally to everyone who needs them.
"We need vaccines and treatments that will work for the world, and any advances must be available to all countries equally, without exception," said Alex Harris, the head of global policy at Wellcome.
Donald Trump (Score:2)
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Sure he will, he'll just lie about. He's above lying like a brick is above the Sargasso Sea (Douglas Adams).
Re:Donald Trump (Score:5, Informative)
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Thank goodness! We Americans have done a totally shit job as "world leader". It's good someone finally decided to put an end to it. All we ever did is launch wars of aggression against countries of brown people who never attacked us. We spent ourselves broke trying this crap. And who asked us to be world leader, anyway? World bully is more like it.
World leadership does not employ or feed your starved citizens. It's a white elephant. Any country looks after its own interest first and then only other
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I nominate the King of Tonga to be the next world leader. Sure, he's not perfect, there's a bit of royal scandal now and then, and lacks a lot of global economic acumen. But he's far away and few people pay attention to him, which is what I look for in a world leader.
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If you think Angela Merkel has been quiet lately, then perhaps you should use a different news source. The fact that you haven’t heard anything is simply indicative of the media you choose to consume.
And so it begins... (Score:1)
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They may understand science, but their understanding of economics isn't so good.
They seem to believe that the best way to spur innovation is to ensure no one can profit from it.
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They understand economics as well as the next person, the thing is it not about 1 or the other things can have levels, It is not allow millions of people to die because people need to make money, or complete communism where everything is shared no matter the amount of work you do. There is a middle way. Having either party being able to set a price will not work out well if it is the consumer it will be 0, if it the producer as much they can charge and have no relation at all to the actual cost of productio
Re:And so it begins... (Score:4, Insightful)
There are nearly 8 billion people in the world. Let's say 4 billion of them get the vaccine. Let's say the inventor charges a $10 fee. That is $40B. That is quite an incentive, but it is far less than the economic cost of the pandemic for ONE DAY just in America.
If a potential profit of $40B speeds up the vaccine by a single day, it is worth it.
The entire world-wide profit of the pharmaceutical companies last year was about $400B.
That is far less than the cost of the lockdowns for a single week.
We need to fix the problem, not fret that the people actually solving the problem may be rewarded for their efforts.
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Why do you think the inventor will charge ONLY a $10 fee? More likely a $10000 fee, until supplies ramp up. Whether they ramp up because of licensed producers or whether a country that is smart enough to indulge in state-supported industrial espionage is delivering it, doesn't matter. Trump can shout about Huawei all he wants, but the rest of the world is going to buy their gear. It's only Americans dumb enough to be conned by economic philosophy to paying ridiculous prices.
What's the US going to do. Bomb a
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Re: And so it begins... (Score:2)
Why do you think the inventor will charge ONLY a $10 fee? More likely a $10000 fee, until supplies ramp up.
That only works if you manage to be out in front of everyone else. If several companies are on similar timelines then you are only going to have a short time of exclusive sales before facing competition. I expect what will happen is several vaccines will be approved at about the same time and the company that profits the most will be the one who can ramp up production and keep costs down the most.
Re:And so it begins... (Score:4, Insightful)
A vaccine this widely distributed can be made cheaply though. Medicine has to amortized across how many doses will be used of it. If you spend 1bil making a medicine that 100 people will take, it's gonna be stupid expensive, but if 1bil people take it, can make it cheap. On the other hand, even if you license it out for others to use, you aren't going to use your own production capacity to help others until your country is covered, after that can make it for others. So countries with good biomed production will obviously get their people fixed before helping the countries that can't make it.
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So countries with good biomed production will obviously get their people fixed before helping the countries that can't make it.
This is true, but it is not a sensible policy.
We should focus on vaccinating the over-50s and perhaps the over-40s. But younger people face little risk and children face almost no risk.
Once we get the at-risk people vaccinated, it will save more lives to start sending the vaccines to poor countries rather than vaccinating low-risk people at home.
Step #1: Vaccine formula becomes public domain (Score:3, Insightful)
Furthermore any pharmaceutical company with a lick of sense sells it at cost.
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I doubt they could keep it secret anyway. Every spy agency in the world would be after it, through hacking or through physical theft or even kidnapping the people who know about it. No multinational company could be involved in discovery or manufacturer for fear of heavy sanctions in every country it has any presence which doesn't get the vaccine.
In fact even trying to make money off it will be next to impossible. Once places like India and China get hold of it they will be producing generic versions regard
Re:Step #1: Vaccine formula becomes public domain (Score:4, Insightful)
We, {insert pharmaceutical company name here}, the developers of the COVID-19 vaccine that saved humanity, present to you {insert new product name here}
Whatever company makes it across the finish line with an effective vaccine first will get years, if not decades, of positive press and advertising value out of it. They'll make billions and billions more off everything they produce because of it.
Re:Step #1: Vaccine formula becomes public domain (Score:4, Interesting)
The traditional answer is that doing the research to produce reliable vaccines (or medicines of any kind) has a very, very high upfront cost. It is a huge amount of capital that a company must fork over while taking on a huge risk (since it might just not pan out, and all that money will be lost). The only way to keep the business viable is to award them patents so they can recoup those costs and actually make a profit on all that research. Without that, they just won't be able to afford to do the research, and the world won't get the resultant medicines.
So, this argument has nothing to do with morality, it is entirely a matter of practicality. If the money ain't there, the research can't happen.
It seems like there is an obvious answer, though: fund the research through taxpayer money. A government-run medical drug and vaccine research lab can assume the same risks without being destroyed when some research doesn't pan out, and anything produced by such a lab will automatically be public domain. Problem solved.
Personally I tend to favor the capitalist approach to problem solving, but I am no extremist, and in this case I think medical research is a specific institution that works better if it is publicly owned and the results of the research are automatically in the public domain. It feels like a very appropriate balance.
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The only way to keep the business viable is to award them patents
Why are patents the "only way"?
I can think of several ways for medicine to be profitable without creating artificial scarcity.
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Well list some, then.
Basic economics says that reduced supply leads to higher prices. Maximum profitability is always going to be below saturation, so some people will be deprived.
That is perfectly reasonable for a product where the price is related to the cost of production.
It is not so reasonable when most of the cost is in upfront NRE/R&D. We are willing to accept artificial scarcity to recoup the cost of designing an new CPU, but not for medicine.
So if a pharma company thinks they can maximize profit by only making en
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Nothing is in higher demand than medicine, especially for new things. We want extreme greed to yank these things into existence from the murderous void. That is always better than not having the treatments.
You can't give it away for free until someone invents it. Take it from them, and you just teach people not to make the effort. Pfizer cancelled an $800 million phase 3 trial of a drug that kept one particular mutant family of fatasses with clear arteries. But it failed.
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Re:Step #1: Vaccine formula becomes public domain (Score:4, Informative)
Consider this: If you have no customers, then you can't sell your product. If our civilization completely collapses because half the world or more is dead then your company won't exist anymore.
You realize that neither of those scenarios is relevant to COVID-19 vaccines, right? This isn't a zombie apocalypse.
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I guess it depends on where you live.
Aside from seeing some masks when you got to stores, etc.....things don't look really all that different around here.
More people at home, but when you pass them when out on a walk or bike ride or see them out working in the yards (every day activities) you'd likely never know much serious was going on....people still wave and talk to each other, jus
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So far as 'tyrannical practices' go, the precautions mandated aren't fun but they're not particularly draconian, especially if you remember that they could have just jumped straight to Martial Law and had orders to detain and/or shoot anyone wandering around outside 'without authoriz
Re: Step #1: Vaccine formula becomes public domain (Score:3)
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If there's no vaccine or insufficient vaccine and everyone starts fucking up, yes, billions could die, theoretically. This clearly ain't amateur night anymore.
I see math isn't your strong point.
7 billion people in the world.
~7% above the age of 65 or about 490 million (wiki world population)
At age 80 have a 14.8% chance of dying.
At age 65 have a 3.6% chance of dying.
At age 50 or younger less than 1% chance of dying.
Even if you consider that there could be a +/-2% statistical error in the above numbers. Where exactly to you come up with billions could die from this virus?
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Be very careful what you 'wish' for. Those numbers only hold true with medicals system in good condition. As soon as triage is needed outside, on the hospital parking lot, those numbers fly out of the window. That's what GP mentioned about 'everyone starts fucking up'.
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According to wikipedia, as of the end-of-day May 17 totals, 83,439 have died in the U.S. and the current death rate is below 1,000 a day and declining. It looks like the chances of the official death count being over 100k by June 1 are about even. Consider also that there are documented cases of non-COVID deaths being counted as COVID deaths, and that some of the deaths were of people who would have died anyway.
Your cowardly reference to Trump shows that you don't know that corporate bankruptcy differs from
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Re: Step #1: Vaccine formula becomes public domain (Score:2)
The only way to keep the business viable is to award them patents so they can recoup those costs and actually make a profit on all that research.
There is another way. Let them race to the finish line and patent whatever they want, then the government can buy the patents at market value and release it for free.
The company makes an immediate profit and the whole world gets the vaccine at cost.
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The entire world wide medicine research budget is only $35bn. Given the much money we are losing to this nations should be finding this research.
Longer term we should set up an international fund to keep on top of this kind of thing.
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If a morality isn't practical, it has no worth whatsoever.
Re:Step #1: Vaccine formula becomes public domain (Score:5, Insightful)
Step #2: massive exit from present vaccine development, next pandemic occurs and, for some mysterious reason, not a single company is interested in developing a vaccine, Slashdot User 462797 declares triumphant victory over capitalists
Look, we do need to ramp up production as much as possible. And make sure the potential vaccine(s) gets to everyone, regardless of economic status. But we should also be literally heaping gold on whatever and whoever can save us, maybe even those who try and don't succeed. On no account should we turn it into a penalty where every dollar you sink into development becomes a loss to your bottom line. That would be like trying to offer the public 'free healthcare' by announcing doctors must not receive a salary. *Probably* not going to work out for your healthcare system in the long term.
By all means let governments pay the bills and it's great if there are subsidies for poor countries. Negotiate rights for global production. But certainly make this worth the investment for those who have jumped in to meet our need when our need was great.
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Oh, ye of little understanding.
His point was that commercial entities would stop working on new vaccines if government stole the new vaccine from its developer, made sure the developer wouldn't profit from it, and made it quite clear that this would be government policy in the future.
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Eh, now you have discovered that public domain is a thing? After years of trying to eradicate it? Now when "intellectual property" suddenly threatens your survival?
Let's make a deal: the vaccine is shared for free with anyone who agrees to roll back the copyright and patent crap rules created during last 100 years.
(Nothing personal against you, Rick.)
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Maybe the work you do belonged to the public all along and so you should give it away also.
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Cost free cross licensing for non-profit use. (Score:2)
Opportunity versus equality societies (Score:1)
Hmm. We have countries where vaccines and therapeutic drugs won't be developed. They've spent the last few decades leveling their societies, making sure that achievement has limited rewards versus just going through the motions. Especially in health fields where profits are limited.
On the other hand, you have counties with income inequality. Income inequality provides a very strong incentive to achieve, to invent, to push the bounds of technology and discovery forward. Profits for advancement are high.
Re: Opportunity versus equality societies (Score:1)
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Hmm. We have countries where vaccines and therapeutic drugs won't be developed. They've spent the last few decades leveling their societies, making sure that achievement has limited rewards versus just going through the motions.
Which countries are you talking about here?
this shows failure of communism (Score:1)
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Stinks of CCP (Score:1)
That's not what that link says (Score:2)
"The leaders of Italy, France, Germany and Norway, together with the European commission and council, called earlier this month for any innovative tools, therapeutics or vaccines to be shared equally and fairly."
The text linked to the citation https://www.theguardian.com/wo... [theguardian.com] was "equally and fairly" but the word "equal" does not appear in the article. Nor does the word "fair". What the fuck are you trying to pull?
Nope, nothing of the sort said (Score:2)
Instead article says some countries will be contributing money for research and vaccine... not the same thing. The big pharmy companies will make and sell and license as per usual.
That parasite Bill Gates just wants a piece of that action, that's why he blathers about vaccinating 7 billion people.
Dumb question? (Score:2)
If countries are subsidising wages for people to stay home, safe, bust basically do nothing... why cant countries all donate to a global fund for pharmasuticals to cover up front costs?
Wouldnt that make this less of a concern?
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Do you know how many vaccines are in development? Over 80 last I heard Which ones are you going to direct the countries to fund? Most if not all will be useless. In 60 years of making coronavirus vaccines zero are approved for use, we may have zero two years from now.
Re: Dumb question? (Score:2)
Good point, and clearly a topic i know very little about.
I guess the nature of my question had more to do with it becoming a global effort, not a handout. Even if the above weren't the vehicle behind it.
Also that it feels like backing peoples wages and not having them work, might not he as smart if we dont have an endgame. One would think that there are different ways every country could contribute in some was, onviously some more than others too. There has to be a way to make it make sense... even thoug
But... (Score:2)
I thought that sharing needles was bad
Availability to the world (Score:1)
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The Anti-Vaxers in the USA won't like this (Score:2)
one little bit.
Then there are the Covid deniers.
Even if we have a working vaccine by the end of the year, there are a number of groups who will go out of their way to stop people from getting protection. That could well reduce the effectiveness of any Vaccine.
Getting a Vaccine is only the first of many problems to get around before this is over.
$DrugCorp$ won't go for it... (Score:2)
$DrugCorp$ won't go for OSD [Open Source Drug]...
...nor will the governments that they fund...
WHO needs to STFU until there's a vaccine (Score:1)
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The fact that you put the head of a football association in the same league as a UN organization is quite telling of your knowledge on the subject.
Trubble (Score:2)
I want to see an elected politician kill his own people because he sent some of it elsewhere while it was still needed.
Good luck with that.
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If America gets it,
There's no question whether America gets it. The only question is which of the next 15 months that happens. Some other country might beat the US by a month or two. Probably not though. More than 1 vaccine is highly likely.
Will anyone learn anything about the relative merits of US policies versus policies in other places?
Can't Profit Financially (Score:2, Insightful)
What you don't want to do is to make it "free for anyone to make." That just ensures that there's no profit incentive to make it
That's EXACTLY what you want. The reward here has to be the global reputation you will gain from saving thousands, if not millions of lives and returning billions of lives to normalcy. If you start trying to make a huge profit from it governments are not going to bankrupt their economies further to pay for it, they are going to start rewriting IP laws to allow local companies to copy it. this is also likely to prompt a long hard look at international laws and treaties on IP rights which is not something th
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Doesn't work. HCQ has no profit incentive, and _is_ the cure, but powers-that-be are sabotaging it because there's no money in it. They're suppressing it in favor of someone coming up with something new that they can charge $100 a pill and make billions. This damned pandemic would be OVER if we had a trillion pills of HCQ, but there's no monetary reason to make it so. Therefore, people continued to die while the cure sits and does nothing for lack of a profit incentive.
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HCQ is made by Novartis, and last I checked, they didn't do it for shits and giggles, they did it to make money. And make money they do, including from HCQ.
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Its made by lots of folks, but is way out of patent, which means it can be made by anyone at all with the ability, which means that nobody can charge $100 / pill and end up with $2K to cure each person with the disease rather than the $100 or so required to cure a person using HCQ / Z-pack / ZnSO4. Soooo... they don't ramp up, and wait for something else that they CAN patent, and then charge $100 / pill, and end up with $2K per patient.
Right now, the distraction that doesn't work for shit is this Remdisiv
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You really don't understand how the pharma industry works, do you? You think you do, but you don't have a clue. Generics manufacturing is a profit centre for the industry, which is why Novartis owns Sandoz, a thriving and profitable generics business that delivered double-digit growth in 2019.
And Novartis have already ramped up: they committed 130m doses by end of May including the 50m doses they already had on hand. So.... you're wrong about that and you're wrong about everything else. Well done you!
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"That's EXACTLY what you want. "
No its not. If there's no profit incentive, then the goop won't get made. One has to have a reason to do things, and although money isn't everything, its waaaaay ahead of whatever is in 2nd place.
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No its not. If there's no profit incentive, then the goop won't get made.
You have a very sad view of life if you think the only reason anyone ever does anything is for money.
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Only businessmen will do this and businessmen only do things for money (profit). Charity is for pious individuals.
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Re: Shouldn't Be a Concern (Score:3)
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Errr...because we're a Christian Nation? Our alleged president's religious right supporters tell us he's a baby Christian. He even has Prosperity Preacher as his "spiritual advisor"...she'll have to find his spirit first.
What has the baby Christian done? Turned away refugees at the southern borders, refugees fleeing the drug gangs funded by the drugs Americans buy. He claims to believe in America First, yet he's turned the presidency into Trump First.
America used to believe in the poem on the Statue of Libe
Re: Shouldn't Be a Concern (Score:2)
Why should they get a free ride?
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Well... really... the fact that things suck in your country is not qualification for "refugee" status.
To be a refugee, you have to be oppressed by your own government, or fleeing a civil war, so something like that. Just because your up to your ass in violent drug gangs isn't sufficient. That can happen anywhere. Its up to you to get a weapon and fight them for your country, not flee your country.
Otherwise, there's a LEGAL way to immigrate. Use it. Don't sneak in.
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Statue of Liberty is bullshit, that poem was written by whites. America did not permit immigration from Africa when that was written. 100% racism. Emblazoned in bold print on the first page of the lead article is the declaration that, "Our founding ideals of liberty (as in Statue of) and equality were false when they were written." [nytimes.com] Slavery grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional. We've got to to reframe American history, making explicit how slavery is the foundation on which this c
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That was the popular belief, but it's demonstrably wrong. Self-interested workers are more efficient than forced workers.
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Because this is a global pandemic. The virus has to be stamped out everywhere, that's how this thing works. If the "third world" is left unvaccined, the virus will keep spreading and mutating there, and new waves of disease will keep coming to us too.
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Well, maybe they should, but I'm not wealthy and would consider the 6 week tour if India if I had to get cured of hepatitis while getting the drug there dirt cheap. But yeah, anyway, that's the way its done now.
Americans can get it without being wealthy by having good health insurance. I do, so I probably wouldn't have to travel to India for it. But some others might. Its called medical tourism, and happens for all sorts of things like teeth implants which, at one time, were $6,000 / tooth here, and som
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Bullshit. Dr. Didier Raoult has conducted his trial of 1063 infected patients, cured 973 of them for a 91.7% cure rate, with only 43 bad outcomes and 8 deaths. This result has been duplicated by numerous doctors on an individual basis of their treating their own patients with the drug.
Here's a transcript of the Laura Ingraham show where she announces Dr. Raoult's finding, which is about the only place to find it because the greedy MF'er's that are suppressing this can't quite get the job done with Laura
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The key question is: what would have happened if these patients would not have taken the medicine? It is not at all clear that they would have been worse of.
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But we already know that. Remember when the mortality rate was calculated at about 2.5%, when the demominator was made up of only those presenting symptoms. Well, that's Dr. Didier's denominator - he's not treating people with no symptoms, since there's no reason to.
So, out of 1063, 2 1/2% would have been expected to die. That would be 26 people. But only 8 actually did die. So, 18 were saved.
Simple math, the goop works, and fairly dramatically.
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No control group?
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Control groups aren't used on deadly diseases, since the control group would have members die, which is unacceptable.
The control group is everyone else who didn't get treatment for some other reason.
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Control groups aren't used on deadly diseases, since the control group would have members die, which is unacceptable.
The control group is everyone else who didn't get treatment for some other reason.
Your control group is all the people who are very sick. Then it makes it look like your drug actually did something when you compare to it.
Alternate method is just choose healthier people for your 'trial'.
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Yes. He's France's foremost infectious disease expert.
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Also, another more recent transcript from the Laura Ingraham show:
Laura Ingraham continues to promote the cure for the damned virus that is being ignored by the mainstream. She had Dr. Ivette Lozano from Dallas - Ft. Worth area and asked if the HCQ was effective. The doctor said:
"Every patient that I've treated, serious, moderate, has had resolution of symptoms within 24 hours, are improved within 5 hours, the fevers are gone within 2 days, the lung restriction, which is the most important, resolves within
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So which member of the "powers that be" that are suppressing HCQ for a profit incentive are you?
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Are you a troll, or just a product of the American educational system? Hard to tell...
Re: They expect free US made vaccine (Score:1)
Have a nice day.
Re: They expect free US made vaccine (Score:2)
Re: They expect free US made vaccine (Score:2)