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Covid: US backs waiver on vaccine intellectual property

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Covid: US backs waiver on vaccine intellectual property

#171

Post by KirillPanov »

andreareina wrote: post #59
KirillPanov wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love it if somebody would post a more detailed explanation of the mRNA vaccine manufacturing process here on HN. The news media keeps mumbling vague terms like "ingredients", and it's frustrating. Conventional vaccine production is a highly biological process... chicken eggs being used to make the flu vaccines and so forth. I was under the impression that the mRNA vaccines are chemically much simpler -- just…

Derek Lowe goes into it a little bit with some links to further resources. [1] https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/02/02/my... [2] https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/02/22/mo...

> [1] https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/02/02/my...

Okay, this is the best article of them all, the one I was wishing for. Congratulations, you win ten thousand Internets!

Best part (although the whole thing is totally worth reading):

As Neubert says, “Welcome to the bottleneck!” Turning a mixture of mRNA and a set of lipids into a well-defined mix of solid nanoparticles with consistent mRNA encapsulation, well, that’s the hard part. ... Everyone is almost certainly having to use some sort of specially-built microfluidics device ... These will be special-purpose bespoke machines, and if you ask other drug companies if they have one sitting around, the answer will be “Of course not”. This is not anything close to a traditional drug manufacturing process. And this is the single biggest reason why you cannot simply call up those “dozens” of other companies and ask them to shift their existing production over to making the mRNA vaccines.

Re: Covid: US backs waiver on vaccine intellectual property

#173

Post by neolog »

refurb wrote: post #166
neolog wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine being so rich you can lose a billion dollars under normal operation.

You know how I know you don’t understand how R&D works?

Fair enough, for Moderna. Though my argument works better for J&J's numbers [1] with >$10B net income most years.

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/JNJ/johnson-johnso...

Re: Covid: US backs waiver on vaccine intellectual property

#174

Post by strogonoff »

apexalpha wrote: post #74
throwaway4good wrote: post #27

Something here smells deeply hypocritical. Currently vaccine companies such as the German Curevac (which is the vaccine company Trump famously tried to buy) is being held back by lack of core ingredients which are under American export bans. The US still upholds the export bans setup by the Trump administration. Biden can just revoke those. Yet he promotes the idea of waivering vaccine patents knowing well how hard t…

The US put an export ban on basically everything regarding vaccines, very early on. If you look at the amount of vaccines produced , the US and EU are fairly close to each other. The difference in Vaccine rollout comes from the fact that the EU exports vaccines to other countries while the US does not. As a European I would've been in favour of more export controls, but a total ban seems to go too far. Why should 18…

> As a European I would've been in favour of more export controls, but a total ban seems to go too far. Why should 18 years olds in the EU/US receive a vaccine before 75 year olds in other countries?

I don’t know if my intuition is correct, but reigning in COVID’s R₀ worldwide at once seems like a moonshot in current state of civilization (keeping in mind its mutations and all).

Meanwhile, for better or for worse, the planet isn’t a single community: given border controls that can serve as a barrier to virus spread, it might just be more realistic to get things under control in smaller disconnected populations, which can then “bubble up”, restore quality of life and allow freedom of movement between themselves while at the same time helping bring other parts of the world back up to speed.

And yes, this does smell of the trolley problem and I wouldn’t want to be the person who would have to make such a decision.

Re: Covid: US backs waiver on vaccine intellectual property

#175

Post by dagw »

_nkl1 wrote: post #155
apexalpha wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US put an export ban on basically everything regarding vaccines, very early on. If you look at the amount of vaccines produced , the US and EU are fairly close to each other. The difference in Vaccine rollout comes from the fact that the EU exports vaccines to other countries while the US does not. As a European I would've been in favour of more export controls, but a total ban seems to go too far. Why should 18…

| If you look at the amount of vaccines produced, the US and EU are fairly close to each other. EU has 2x the number of people.

The EU has 448 million people, the US has 332 million. So nowhere close to 2x.

Re: Covid: US backs waiver on vaccine intellectual property

#176

Post by thehappypm »

sealeck wrote: post #170
thehappypm wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The West has a deep obligation to end the pandemic globally, but it also has every right to end the pandemic at home first. Israel, the US, and the UK are acting like they're at war against the pandemic, and finally, they're winning.

But other countries have acted as though there was an infectious disease outbreak, haven't had the deaths and don't need to "win" because they didn't "loose" in the first place.

Yes, China was very successful at containing the outbreak by welding the ill into their apartment buildings. Australia and New Zealand had the benefit of their rather extreme isolation from the rest of the world. India looked like it was doing great til it wasn't.

Re: Covid: US backs waiver on vaccine intellectual property

#177

Post by beckman466 »

vkou wrote: post #157
beckman466 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Patent laws [...] are artificial constructs What do you make of the move corporations are making away from the use of patents, towards the use of a hybrid ‘trade secret + patent‘ sandwich? Is there a scenario where it does not stifle innovation? I’m asking because I personally don’t see any. As you said these systems are artificial constructs, and at the worst this taking away as trade secrets is theft on an enormo…

> What do you make of the move corporations are making away from the use of patents, towards the use of a hybrid ‘trade secret + patent‘ sandwich? Is there a scenario where it does not stifle innovation? I take that it's not happening to the extent claimed, and that those claims are largely self-serving propaganda used as justification for a legal land-grab. Of course patent owners are going to argue that their paten…

> I take that it's not happening to the extent claimed, and that those claims are largely self-serving propaganda used as justification for a legal land-grab.

Really? What you are basing this off of?

Re: Covid: US backs waiver on vaccine intellectual property

#178

Post by Jordrok »

mbg721 wrote: post #132
haswell wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let us not forget the climate that Trump created for himself. Much of that constant negative coverage was more about his antics and absurdities, and at some point, it became impossible for him to do/say much of anything without completely deserved backlash. With that said, I can’t claim there is no media bias re: Biden, but we should not pretend that the circumstances are even close to similar.

That only happened because conservatives gave up trying to please a hostile audience. Reagan was Satan incarnate, until 20 years later, when he was a voice of reason compared to Dubya. Rinse and repeat.

Nobody cares about your conservative victomhood complex. If your leaders aren't mature enough to do their job without throwing a temper tantrum whenever someone says something mean about them, then sit the fuck down and let the adults handle it.
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