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Always has been a good plaice to read the latest
If only they haddockome together sooner, for cod's sake.
They certainly don't want to be perched on the fence for this issue.
Some time for them to mullet it over.
It might mean choosing the same side as France.
Perhaps Boris should meet Macron at Jersey for a fish supper :-)
WTP... most of them won't of thought it through before making initial noises but after further thought and listening to sensible advice I'm sure they realise it's just a bad idea I hope Boris chooses the right side
Of course, its political posturing because out there is the notion of Evil Pharma who need punishing.. oh really like the brilliance of Sahin and co needs punishing!!
This is brilliant from our fave science blogger and whole article worth reading:
'All That Money
I realize that this talk of IP waivers comes, as fate would have it, while some of the vaccine companies are reporting earnings on the vaccines themselves. Pfizer, for example, has said that they may well have $26 billion of sales of the vaccine that they developed with BioNTech. And while I don’t know what the actual profit will be, it’s going to still be a lot. Allow me to be offensive: good for them. 26 billion is a small fraction of the economic damage that’s been done during the year because of the pandemic, and these vaccines are really the only way out of it. Add to that the incalculable social and psychological damages, and it’s a damned cheap price for all of the vaccines put together. Remember, there was no guarantee that any of these things would work – several large and very competent drug companies (Merck, GSK, Sanofi) failed in their own vaccine efforts.
The vaccines that have worked have been the result of years of work by both academia and industry. Both of these groups have hoped to profit by their efforts. And as I never seem to get tired of pointing out, a lot of that work went into discovering things that didn’t work. RNA constructs that fell apart or didn’t produce much protein. Formulations that didn’t deliver, or were toxic. Viral vectors that weren’t worked-out enough, or couldn’t be produced in sufficient quantity. Genetic payloads that weren’t written in quite the right ways. So when something finally does work, I am all for being able to profit from it, and to cheer on the people who are hoping to profit from the discoveries that are working their way through the academic and industrial labs now.'
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/05/06/waiving-ip
Macron:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/eu-says-patent-waiver-idea-misses-point-of-vaccine-shortage-europe-emmanuel-macron-joe-biden-porto-portugal-b1843952.html
Why do i get the feeling he did an about turn on this?
Looking more and more like an ill thought out idea by Biden and his advisors. However I think it was a win-win for him, maybe he and his advisors knew there would be too much resistance to the idea anyway, but Biden can say "hey, I tried but greedy pharma and Germany says no" which makes him look good. And modern politics is all about posturing/trying to look good in the eyes of the electorate, sadly.
Isn't the actual meeting between the nations about this tonight?
Biden trying to appease progressive Democrats, who also want student debt forgiveness etc...
Macron not supportive of it either ....Looking more and more like a dead duck.
'Emmanuel Macron has echoed the German government’s concerns over Joe Biden’s proposed suspension of intellectual property rights for Covid-19 vaccines as he urged the US and the UK to instead start exporting doses around the world.
Arriving at an EU summit in Porto in Portugal, the French president expressed his reservations about the White House proposal to waive patents and criticised the lack of exports coming from “Anglo-Saxon” countries.
“What is the current issue?” he asked. “It is not really about intellectual property. Can you give intellectual property to laboratories that do not know how to produce and will not produce tomorrow? The main issue for solidarity is the distribution of doses.'