Big Pharma performed a miracle by creating innovative vaccines astonishingly quickly, forcing the ChiCom virus to wind down. Progressives, who are heavily invested in prolonging the pandemic so they can continue to exploit it, will not let this happen again. They demand that pharmaceutical companies surrender their patents:

“Multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical companies continue to prioritize profits by protecting their monopolies,” Bernie Sanders says. Adds Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro: “We need to make the public policy choices both in the U.S. and at the WTO that puts patients first.”

The World Trade Organization has been petitioned by relatively backward countries to suspend intellectual property protection on coronavirus vaccines.

Breaking patents won’t accelerate vaccine production or distribution to poor countries. Pharmaceutical companies are ramping up manufacturing as fast as they can, including in low-income countries.

Even if patents are stolen on their behalf, poor countries can’t make these sophisticated vaccines without help from the developers. But at least bullying backed by Marxist rhetoric may spur more vaccine donations.

World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who supports the WTO campaign, last week called the gap between vaccines distributed in rich and poor countries “grotesque.”

What is grotesque is that this literal communist who has been credibly accused of war crimes and who has helped spread Covid by serving as a mouthpiece for the Chinese Communist Party is in a position to demand that other people’s intellectual property be confiscated.

Why doesn’t his native Ethiopia give its vaccine patents to the USA? Just kidding; countries like that are not capable of developing vaccines, largely because they tend to be run by smash and grab thugs.

If the USA succumbs to people cut of the same cloth as Tedros (e.g., Bernie Sanders), we won’t be capable either. It takes massive investment to create medical innovation. No one will bother if anything produced will only be seized by thieves, like the formula for Rearden metal in Atlas Shrugged.

Liberals posture ostentatiously about their concern for the Third World. However,

There would be more deaths if not for medicines developed in the U.S. and Europe. In 2012 J&J introduced the first novel treatment for multi-drug resistant TB in nearly half a century. About 2.5 times more people died of tuberculosis in India in 2019 than have from Covid.

As for equitable distribution: first, those who made it deserve first dibs; second, the rate of Covid mortality is many times higher in advanced countries due to the older population; and third,

U.S. and European governments have donated billions of dollars to a WHO-backed initiative to distribute vaccines to poor countries. AstraZeneca has promised to allocate nearly two-thirds of its vaccines to the developing world. J&J has pledged up to 500 million doses, and Novavax 1.1 billion.

However, looters and moochers will never be satisfied.

On a tip from Varla.

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