AstraZeneca got the help of The Serum Institute in India, for example, so it proves that they can cooperate. If they can do that, I don't see why open sourcing would be impossible. And they're manufacturing at cost, so lack of profit isn't the issue there. Also, Oxford were considering open sourcing before Bill Gates stepped in.
It just seems like Bill Gates and others were convinced that the poors couldn't do it, although India isn't the richest, and yet The Serum Institute is the biggest vaccine manufacturer in the world I think.
What happened to competition and consumers (governments in this case) being able to determine the best products?
One issue I can think of is regulation, if you have several versions of each vaccine that might have key differences and require separate studies.
AstraZenica and whoever else “open sourced” their vaccines
So fun fact, Oxford developed it and was intent on doing exactly that. Open source, produce the hell out of it everywhere.
Bill Gates decided it was better that they license it exclusively to AstraZenica.
https://khn.org/news/rather-than-give-away-its-covid-vaccine-oxford-makes-a-deal-with-drugmaker/
There is no punishment conceived by man that is enough for Bill fucking Gates.
That's what's confusing about all of those replies. Of course its difficult to manufacture it, but are they really saying that other phama companies wouldn't be able to replicate the process if the vaccines were "open sourced". I would think that having more companies producing the vaccines would be better so that way the pressure to produce the vaccines wouldn't be shouldered by just two companies. They're making the case for why the vaccine should be shared with other companies.
Is there any open source covid vaccine from any country? Cuz it would be pretty funny if a mass produced open source vaccine developed by say, China or Cuba, were to sweep the world. Or if all of Latin America was reasonably vaccinated faster than the US
Canada was supposed to and instead Europe fucked them.
Sold off their own ability to produce this stuff because privatization is pure upside and who would ever need to produce their own vaccine in a modern interconnected world.
Capitalism is the best thing since sliced bread, it got us to the moon, it's ending poverty, it's the most efficient economic system known to man, yada yada yada (not to mention all the grandiose claims by the likes of Musk); yet, capitalists are always full of bloody excuses when the system inevitability fails at something. Like the guy in there saying we don't have enough vials, as if vials are fusion reactors.
Ignoring the vials for a sec, surely companies and governments could have cooperated a lot more to replicate the infrastructure. Manufacturing vaccines is difficult of course, but there's clearly more that could have been done.
But money! Gotta make sure the line go up and stonks are strong and money. Cuz we wouldn't have an incentive to develop the vaccine without money! Fuck. Meanwhile retail is gonna become super-spreaders cuz the service industry is a bunch of younger working class people who will probably be last on the list when it comes to dispersing the vaccines. But :stonks-up:
I saw some of those responses earlier and felt like clawing my eyes out. Love the one woman making excuses for pharma companies whose bio says:
PR hack who works with tech and healthcare companies/coalitions
There's also the "Professor of Biochemistry @UW" acting like a total asshole in some of his replies. Definitely the person we want teaching a new generation of researchers. Wouldn't be shocked if he has done work for pharma companies because he seems awfully defensive.
I just love the PhDs that are like, "Well here are the challenges when it comes to manufacturing. You see it costs a lot of money! It's also very complex and takes time" as if the wealthiest country on Earth couldn't pull together the resources necessary for manufacturing vaccines. It's like they used all their brain folds learning about their narrow specialization and the rest of their brain is perfectly smooth.
It’s like they used all their brain folds learning about their narrow specialization and the rest of their brain is perfectly smooth.
humans.jpg
Okay so imagine if you will a country that has hundreds of thousands of healthy young men and women signed up to provide labour.
Imagine that they are good at following instructiions because you taught them to do it.
Now imagine you give them all jobs managing injection sites and even giving vaccines under supervision of an expert.
Shame we just don't have anything like that sort of labor pool sitting around doing pointless shit.
the top three things they care about are profit, profit, and profit. also the next three
Bro, Pfizer started manufacturing vaccines in OCTOBER. You’re telling me not open sourcing for other manufacturers wouldn’t have helped? Academia is full of morons.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthart/2020/10/19/pfizer-reportedly-manufactures-several-hundred-thousand-covid-19-vaccines-anticipating-november-regulatory-approval/?sh=94616695b925
We could also just do a lockdown, at any time, and solve all of these problems.
