Sure, if you endorse a person’s right to force their way into your home and breathe into your mouth for an hour. But I’m pretty sure no one has suggested this.
The only “risk” this is about is the risk that people are going to go out and do things that you want to do, you miss out because you insist it’s too dangerous, and there turns out to be no adverse consequences.
That kind of exaggeration doesn’t really build your case or make you look like you’re taking this all seriously enough to actually know what you’re talking about.
Yes, rinsing them. I’ve honestly never heard of washing fresh veggies with dish soap. I’m pretty sure you arent suppose to use dish soap on anything that will be consumed.
It isnt exaggeration, it’s an extreme example to illustrate the fallacy of what it’s in response to. For the fourth time, no one is exposing you to risks that you havent already chosen to expose yourself to.
My mom never smoked and lived to 67 until stage IV lung cancer.
Maybe she should have smoked?
All those people wanting to control others’ lives limiting smoking in public areas and in businesses?!? This is communism and an assault on freedom!!! Smokers aren’t adding to risks that you haven’t already chosen to expose yourself to.
A recent recap of why the lab accident theory of covid’s origins are not just plausible, but reasonably argued more likely than the natural bat->intermediate animal->human origin theory. There’s also more detail on the molecular biology of the virus as well as information about the Wuhan Virology Lab’s work under US NIH grants than I’d see discussed before, along with considering the “bat direct to human” possibility.
In what follows I will sort through the available scientific facts, which hold many clues as to what happened, and provide readers with the evidence to make their own judgments. I will then try to assess the complex issue of blame, which starts with, but extends far beyond, the government of China…
“When I first saw the furin cleavage site in the viral sequence, with its arginine codons, I said to my wife it was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus,” said David Baltimore, an eminent virologist and former president of the California Institute of Technology, often known as CalTech. “These features make a powerful challenge to the idea of a natural origin for SARS2,” he said. >
It’s documented that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were doing gain-of-function experiments designed to make coronaviruses infect human cells and humanized mice. This is exactly the kind of experiment from which a SARS2-like virus could have emerged. The researchers were not vaccinated against the viruses under study, and they were working in the minimal safety conditions of a BSL2 laboratory. So escape of a virus would not be at all surprising. In all of China, the pandemic broke out on the doorstep of the Wuhan institute. The virus was already well adapted to humans, as expected for a virus grown in humanized mice. It possessed an unusual enhancement, a furin cleavage site, which is not possessed by any other known SARS-related beta-coronavirus, and this site included a double arginine codon also unknown among beta-coronaviruses. What more evidence could you want, aside from the presently unobtainable lab records documenting SARS2’s creation?
Proponents of natural emergence have a rather harder story to tell. The plausibility of their case rests on a single surmise, the expected parallel between the emergence of SARS2 and that of SARS1 and MERS. But none of the evidence expected in support of such a parallel history has yet emerged. No one has found the bat population that was the source of SARS2, if indeed it ever infected bats. No intermediate host has presented itself, despite an intensive search by Chinese authorities that included the testing of 80,000 animals. There is no evidence of the virus making multiple independent jumps from its intermediate host to people, as both the SARS1 and MERS viruses did. There is no evidence from hospital surveillance records of the epidemic gathering strength in the population as the virus evolved. There is no explanation of why a natural epidemic should break out in Wuhan and nowhere else. There is no good explanation of how the virus acquired its furin cleavage site, which no other SARS-related beta-coronavirus possesses, nor why the site is composed of human-preferred codons. The natural emergence theory battles a bristling array of implausibilities.
We’ve already criticized President Biden’s bewildering decision Wednesday to endorse a patent waiver for Covid vaccines and therapies. But upon more reflection this may be the single worst presidential economic decision since Nixon’s wage-and-price controls.
In one fell swoop he has destroyed tens of billions of dollars in U.S. intellectual property, set a destructive precedent that will reduce pharmaceutical investment, and surrendered America’s advantage in biotech, a key growth industry of the future. Handed an American triumph of innovation and a great soft-power opportunity, Mr. Biden throws it all away.
The economic self-damage is also hard to fathom. The U.S. currently has a competitive advantage in biotech and biologics manufacturing, which could be a growing export industry. Waiving IP protections for Covid vaccines and medicines will give away America’s crown pharmaceutical jewels and make the U.S. and world more reliant on India and China for pharmaceuticals.
Moderna has been working on mRNA vaccines for a decade. Covid represents its first success. Ditto for Novavax, which has been at it for three decades. Small biotech companies in the U.S. have been studying how to create vaccines using nasal sprays, pills and patches.
Thanks to Mr. Biden, all this could become the property of foreign governments. Licensing agreements allow developers to share their IP while maintaining quality control. Breaking patents and forcing tech transfers will enable China and low-income countries to manufacture U.S. biotech products on their own.
Look, I’m not on any of those company’s boards, I had no part in their discussions, etc. So I really dont know the reality. But most companies dont have billions of dollars in free capital laying around, what they have was long ago budgeted and allocated to existing research. Wasnt the point of the government funding to allow those companies the liquidity (or just convince them) to quickly dive head first into vaccine development, bypassing their normal R&D funding process?
Regardless, the bottom line is that the government’s money was not purchasing the IP. You cant go back and rewrite the agreement after-the-fact just because you decide you should’ve gotten more for your money. The government got a vaccine on the market in a previously unheard of 9 months, exactly what they paid for.
Considering how many trillion dollars were spent by congress in COVID emergency spending bills and what portion of that money has been wasted, not spent yet, or even had a negative effect, those billions that went to big pharma were the best investments we made BY FAR. But it doesn’t give us the right to steal from them. I think they’d gladly give back the billions with interest (lol) if it meant we didn’t get to rob them. But no one even asked. So the “they took billions” argument doesn’t hold much water for me.
waits for someone to rail that "the Pope is not really Catholic but an ultra liberal plant and real catholics aren’t liberal, so the Pope is irrelevant. "
Ivermectin prophylaxis study of out India, 3000 odd high risk health care workers, showed around a 85% reduction in symptomatic covid between the group who took the drug monthly vs those who didn’t.
Conclusion and relevance Two-doses of oral ivermectin (300 μg/kg given 72 hours apart) as chemoprophylaxis among HCWs reduces the risk of COVID-19 infection by 83% in the following month. Safe, effective, and low-cost chemoprophylaxis have relevance in the containment of pandemic alongside vaccine.
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We observed that the HCWs who took ivermectin chemoprophylaxis had an 83% lower risk of contracting COVID-19 disease in the following month compared to those who did not receive the drug. Based on its long history of clinical use, favourable safety prole, and emerging evidence from the in-vitro study, observationalstudy, and open-label RCT, ivermectin was used as a prophylactic agent for COVID-19 disease in our hospital for HCWs and has shown promising results. The adverse effects reported by the subjects were few and fit into the safety profile of this drug.
Ivermectin is a widely available anti-parasitic drug and has been included in the WHO list of essential medicines. The safety of the drug has been established by its large-scale use in the last four decades for various indications such as onchocerciasis, scabies, head lice, and other parasitic infestations such as ascariasis and trichuriasis.12 Ivermectin has been reported to inhibit the interaction between importin (IMP) α/β1 heterodimer integrase protein, which helps in the nuclear import and propagation of infection by RNA viruses.
Costs almost nothing, better efficacy than JNJ at preventing covid, and none of the blood clot risks…
I should have probably clarified my train of thought, which started on a higher plane before arriving at the sentence above.
What is the purpose of protecting intellectual property? To reward entities who invest their time and money into something new and to encourage R&D. These companies probably didn’t invest all that much of their own money (and certainly not much time at all) to create or distribute the vaccines – they took the government’s money. They have been rewarded with both, the government’s initial grant, and subsequent orders for millions (hundreds of millions?) of doses at sticker price.
The purpose has been served. It probably wouldn’t set a significant precedent, since the situation is rather unique. Just my opinion.
But, do you really think a billion dollars to cover costs would’ve been enough incentive for them to undertake the project in the first place? They did so with their eye on the prize, and that prize was the resulting IP. You have to admit there are issues with telling a company that this is what they will get in the end, then halfway through telling them you’ve changed your mind and decided they have gotten enough.
If it were me, I’d object simply because this vaccine will always be known as “my” vaccine, yet I’d be losing control over manufacturing and quality control. The potential threat to reputation is worth as much as the threat to profits.
Smacks of “you didn’t build that.” A deal is a deal. What exactly is wrong with shareholders getting rich off the most amazing pharmaceutical development in a century that could save millions of lives over an extremely short time period? Why should we even concern ourselves with it? If stealing the IP isn’t going to get shots in the arms of Indians any faster (Big Pharma is licensing the production and it is working. Handing the IP over to manufacturers that aren’t able to license will be a slow process and will probably include lots of low quality production), why are you in favor of it?
