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After weeks tremendous pressure, Biden administration appeared on the side waiver of intellectual property rights for coronavirus vaccines. Since Biden reported earlier this month, so have the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation reverse route and accepted the waiver of the patent. But Bill Gates himself, subject to a revived study of the area sexual misconduct and perhaps the most powerful person in global health has not changed.
While U.S. residents are rapidly integrating and can see the pandemic coming to an end, most countries in the world will probably need it. wait years in many doses of their vaccine, “in the condition described as follows”vaccine apartheid“. Ia half of all vaccine shots They are administered in only 16 rich countries, and India a a terrible coronavirus crisis.
That could have been avoided. Earlier last year, countries in the South Global forced the World Health Organization to unveil a pool of technology-sharing. C-TAP, which would remove intellectual property barriers to access to Covid-19 treatments and vaccines.
Bill Gates of global health had other thoughts. While maintaining a strong commitment to intellectual property rights, Gates pushed for a plan this would allow companies to have exclusive rights to life-saving medicines, which has benefited them from the amount of public funding. Given Gates ’tremendous impact on the world of public health, his vision eventually won Covax the program — patent rights are monopolized and relies on the charitable appetites of rich countries and pharmaceutical giants to supply vaccines around the world. A support choir pharmaceutical companies and the Trump administration were not hurt.
Should we be surprised that a philanthropist who has become a monopolist also maintains his commitment to the patent rights of the monopoly as a philanthropist?
In 2001, Gates emerged from an antitrust saga specified to assert his fame. The case of the federal government at Microsoft was new because it was aimed at what was then a new monopolistic practice: “against intellectual property“In the case of Microsoft, the software seemed to be manipulating against the competitive mode, and Gates painted it as a ruthless monopolist. (Microsoft settled with the government.)
Gates chose to whitewash his reputation by giving truth and philanthropy. But as he opted for global health, his faith in exclusive IP rights was maintained unchanged. If they are to help build a global software empire, they should also help save lives in the global south — despite the evidence in Spain. AIDS and polio adverse epidemics.
Gates ’first attempt began unexpectedly in 1999, following a failure in West South Africa, following the suppression of anti-AIDS medical patents. horrible drug prices and a weakening outbreak of HIV. Eventually, an activist movement around the world managed to pressure the U.S. government and major pharmaceutical interests to back down, with the Gates Foundation simultaneously distributing leaflets to the WHO on the benefits of monopoly patent rights and investing in approaches to the AIDS crisis that would save companies ’property rights in the future.
For the past two decades, Gates repeatedly defended for public health policies that strengthen the ability of companies to stop producing life-saving drugs for others, including the Gates Foundation get outstanding intellectual property. This continues through the Covid-19 pandemic. Last year Gates, the global healthcare community, moved to Covax rather than sharing technology without patents proud Convincing Oxford University no to open his vaccine license. Gates took advantage of a $ 750 million grant to the university for vaccine research, even though the vaccine was developed in a publicly funded laboratory. In the end, Oxford sold a single production right to AstraZeneca, with no guarantee of low prices and an extraordinary opportunity for profits.
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