Category: Vaccines

Frau Merkel (Horses Whinny) Is at It Again

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The day after the Biden Administration said that it supported suspending IP rights on the Covid Vaccine, Angela Merkel comes out against this.

I think that her motivation is pretty simple:  Covid response is going pear-shaped in Germany, with Covid cases spiking, and by ginning up a controversy, she can avoid scrutiny of her handling of the pandemic.

This is not the first time that she has done this, it’s behind the whole policy of “othering” southern Europeans and spreading misery throughout the EU during and after the financial crisis.

She knows that if she’s seen as doing something, anything, with the argument that she is protecting Germans from the undeserving “other” she, and her CDU Party, can benefit, even if it provides no benefit to Germans, and may kill hundreds of thousands of people around the world.

Merkel is despicable:

The US and Germany are at odds on the issue of waivers for patents on Covid-19 vaccines, as Berlin argued that a waiver would not increase production and would inhibit future private sector research.

The disagreement is the first major rift between the two economic powers since Joe Biden took office, and threatens to deadlock discussions at the World Trade Organization (WTO) and sour relations within the G7 group of major industrialised democracies.

Any WTO decision on a waiver would have to be by consensus, so Germany opposition is a major obstacle to intellectual property rights on vaccines being suspended.

The Biden government’s announcement on Wednesday that it would back a waiver on vaccine patents was welcomed by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a step towards greater global equity at a time when poor countries have little access to vaccines and south Asia has been hit by a devastating outbreak. India accounted for 46% of the new Covid-19 cases recorded around the world over the past week, and there are signs the wave is spreading to Nepal, Sri Lanka and other neighbouring states.

But Angela Merkel’s government came out against a waiver on Thursday.

“The US suggestion for the lifting of patent protection for Covid-19 vaccines has significant implications for vaccine production as a whole,” a government spokeswoman said.

“The limiting factors in the production of vaccines are the production capacities and the high-quality standards and not patents,” she added, arguing that the companies were already working with partners to boost manufacturing capacity.

This argument about the difficulty of vaccines is patently false, as I noted yesterday. 

You can mass produce mRNA viruses in a space smaller than the file room necessary to store the quality control documents, and Angela Merkel knows this; she got her PhD in Quantum Chemistry.

Unfortunately, there is no one in politics in Germany who is willing to call her out on her lies.

I am Gobsmacked

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But in a good way.

In a moved that surprised me the Biden administration has announced that it favors waiving Covie vaccine patents. 

I had hoped that they would eventually do this, but I expected that there would be 6 months of denials and alibis until the moral outrage forced them to take this move.

Happy to be wrong:

The Biden administration on Wednesday threw its support behind a controversial proposal to waive intellectual property protections for coronavirus vaccines, with liberals framing it as a necessary bid to speed the shots to billions in the developing world, while the drug industry warned of devastating effects to vaccine production.

U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai said the United States will now move forward with international discussions to waive the protections for the duration of the pandemic. U.S. officials helped block a World Trade Organization proposal that was introduced last year to stop enforcing patents for coronavirus-related medical products. Dozens of developing countries have pushed for the proposal, arguing that it would allow them to rapidly produce their own generic vaccines, rather than wait months or years for sufficient doses.

………

The decision to go forward with the waiver after weeks of internal deliberations was finalized at a White House meeting on Tuesday with President Biden, said senior administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the deliberations. Staff at the meeting included Tai, national security adviser Jake Sullivan, coronavirus coordinator Jeff Zients, and Bruce Reed, deputy chief of staff for policy, all of whom supported the decision. But Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who had concerns about the waiver, was not included in the meeting, the people said. The Commerce Department declined to comment.

Of course Gina Raimondo wasn’t involved.  She’s a complete corporate stooge, and she would always take the side of whoever is closest to Wall Street, much as she self-dealt to herself and her Wall Street buddies as Governor of Rhode Island.

………

Administration officials have acknowledged their uncertainty about whether the waiver will actually speed up production of coronavirus vaccines across the world. The mRNA vaccines, made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, require special technology that most countries do not have access to, raising questions about which countries will actually have the technological capacity to manufacture the complicated vaccines.

The reporter clearly doesn’t know the technology, as Cory Docterow observes, mRNA vaccines can pack most a whole vaccine factory in the space of a closet: 

So, is it a lie? MRNA vaccines are super-new tech. Maybe their manufacture is so esoteric that only the richest, most powerful countries can make them?

Nope.

“Rapid development and deployment of high‐volume vaccines for pandemic response” (DOI: 10.1002.amp2.10060) is an open access, peer-reviewed paper in the American Institute of Chemical Engineers’ Journal of Advanced Manufacturing and Processing:

https://aiche.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/amp2.10060

Its co-authors are an interdisciplinary team of chemical engineers, infectious disease specialists and vaccine specialists from Imperial College London and the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative.

The authors aren’t specifically addressing themselves to the question of global development of mRNA vaccine production, but are instead concerned with any kind of generic rampup in production — either in response to a new virus, or because of an mRNA-based vaccine breakthrough for an existing virus. They reason that any kind of annual covid shot will occupy the majority of existing mRNA vaccine production facilities, so any new global vaccination project will require that new production sites be built.

 ………

I know, I just blockquoted all of that, so it would be redundant to bullet it below, but JESUS F%$#ING HOLY GODDAMNED SH%$BALLS, does this ever bear repeating:

  • New facilities will be 99–99.9% smaller than conventional vaccine facilities
  • They will be 95–99.7% cheaper than conventional vaccine facilities
  • You could use a single room in a conventional vaccine factory to make more vaccine doses of mRNA vaccines than the entire output of the rest of the factory
  • New vaccines can be made 1,000% faster than previous vaccines

There’s more, like the fact that you only need part of the facility to be a high-spec clean-room, and the rest can be built on more conventional lines.

For $20m, they say they can build a facility where, for $100m/year, they can turn out 1b doses/year, using a single 5L bioreactor.

(%$# mine)

Run the numbers there.  That’s a cost of $0.12/dose. 

Add in the cost of regulatory compliance, packaging, maintaining a cold chain while shipping it a few hundred (as opposed to a few thousand) miles, and tracking lots, and you are still below $10/dose.

The Pharma powers that be are opposed to any sort of relaxation of IP regulations not because duplicating their instrumentality is hard, but because it is trivially easy, and said technology is publicly developed and publicly funded.

They want to continue to extract their rents and keep their ill-gotten gains, because they want another yacht to water-ski behind.

A Stopped Clock Moment

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The 2nd worst Democrat in the Senate, Joe Manchin, has announced his support for IP waivers for generic Covid vaccines.

Of course, this might have something to do with his Kid’s business, as Heather Bresch probably still has outstanding stock options with the now a part of  Upjohn, Mylan.

Mylan is/was a generic drug manufacturer :

Sen. Joe Manchin expressed support for the World Trade Organization proposal to temporarily suspend enforcement of patent and intellectual property enforcement for Covid-19 medical treatments.

The waiver request, led by India and South Africa and backed by a coalition of countries, would allow more widespread global production and distribution of generic coronavirus vaccines, tests, and treatments.

Asked about the waiver proposal on Thursday, Manchin said it sounded like a good idea.

“I’ve always been a supporter of generics coming on,” said Manchin, speaking to The Intercept on Capitol Hill.

I really don’t care what his motivation is, it lends a some “Centrist” cred to the effort to place limits on the reach of IP.

The West Virginia Democrat referenced the fact that the U.S. government financed the research, development, and domestic deployment of coronavirus vaccines. He noted that the drug companies “shouldn’t” generate profits from a product sponsored by taxpayers.

This qualifier applies to every major pharmaceutical development over the past few decades.

Big pharma has devolved into an orgy of rent-seeking.  (Which seems to be my theme for tonight)

Bill Gates Is Really a Worthless Piece of Sh%$

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I have called Bill Gates a mass murderer for his efforts to prevent open source vaccines from being released, and now that there is a rising call for freeing up vaccines, the Microsoft founder is doubling down on his extremist mass-murdering agenda:

Bill Gates, one of the world’s richest men and most powerful philanthropists, was the target of criticism from social justice campaigners on Sunday after arguing that lifting patent protections on COVID-19 vaccine technology and sharing recipes with the world to foster a massive ramp up in manufacturing and distribution — despite a growing international call to do exactly that — is a bad idea.

Directly asked during an interview with Sky News if he thought it “would be helpful” to have vaccine recipes be shared, Gates quickly answered: “No.”

Asked to explain why not, Gates — whose massive fortune as founder of Microsoft relies largely on intellectual property laws that turned his software innovations into tens of billions of dollars in personal wealth — said: “Well, there’s only so many vaccine factories in the world and people are very serious about the safety of vaccines. And so moving something that had never been done — moving a vaccine, say, from a [Johnson & Johnson] factory into a factory in India — it’s novel — it’s only because of our grants and expertise that that can happen at all.”

………

Nick Dearden, executive director of Global Justice Now, one of the lead partner groups in an international coalition calling for WTO patent waivers at a crucial meeting of the world body next month, characterized Gates’ remarks — and the ideological framework behind them — as “disgusting.”

“Who appointed this billionaire head of global health?” asked Dearden. “Oh yeah, he did.”

Bill Gates has always been an asshole.

He was a bully as a boss, and he has spent the past few decades trying to launder his reputation through charity actions that frequently, as in the case of Covid vaccines do more harm than good.

By the time this pandemic is over, he will probably be responsible for more deaths than Saddam Hussein, and perhaps more than Pol Pot.

Got Vax?

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Got my shot


It kind of went like this (Not really)


Not kidding about the liquor store

I just got my vaccine, singular, as in the Johnson and Johnson vaccine.

We got it because it was the only vaccine which would definitively tell us it was corn free, and Sharon* and Nat have some fairly severe corn allergies. 

No issues to speak of, except for the fact that the Rite Aid Pharmacy is right across the street from the Rite Aid Liquor Store. 

I was in the door, got the shot, and was out in less time than it takes to read this article and laugh at the Peanuts strip. 

Of course, then I had to cool my heels for 15 minutes before leaving.

Then we all went and got rolled ice cream (Thai: ไอศกรีมผัด or ไอติมผัด), except for Nat, who got sushi because the ice cream place did not have anything non dairy.

Rolled ice cream is created by taking liquid ice cream adding fixing, and mixing it and spreading it out on an anti-griddle to freeze, and then peeling it off in a roll and adding toppings.

I had never heard of the stuff before, but I liked it.

Mine had lots of caramel, and, of course, whipped cream.

I think that going out for an ice cream after doing my part to vanquish a scourge upon the world is a good arrangement.

*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.

They Do Want Vaccines, You Racist Dirt-Bag

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Sites in PG County mostly serve (White) folks from outside the County

So, now Maryland Governor Larry “Ratf%$#” Hogan is claiming that it’s not his policies that are undervaccinating Black people, it’s that Black folks don’t want vaccines. 

While the never Trumpers see Hogan as the future of the party, it is clear that he as extensively relied on racist appeals to maintain his popularity, particularly by deliberately short-changing Baltimore City and Prince George’s County, the which have the two largest minority communities in the state:

A 94-year-old veteran got so tired of waiting for an appointment that he drove around his Washington suburb at random, hunting for a vaccine.

A partially blind 81-year-old wanted a shot but had no computer or smartphone to register online. Yet another elderly Black resident of Maryland’s hardest-hit county, this one 102 years old, relied on church friends a few decades younger to help her through a distribution system best navigated by Gen Z.

Amid concern that prioritizing speed has heightened vaccine inequity statewide, Prince George’s County stands out: The majority-Black suburb has by far the most coronavirus cases in Maryland, and the lowest percentage of vaccinated residents.

Gov. Larry Hogan (R) has repeatedly cited vaccine hesitancy among minority groups as the key cause for the lagging rates, saying at one point that African American and Latino residents in Prince George’s, who represent 84 percent of the county’s population, are “refusing to take the vaccine.”

But local, state and federal leaders from across Maryland — all of them Democrats — blame the state’s decentralized sign-up system, which they say prioritizes those with more time, technology and information at their disposal over those who are disproportionately dying.

In interviews, more than a dozen vaccine-seeking Prince Georgians agreed.

………

Statewide, Black people represent 31 percent of Maryland’s population but only 16 percent of vaccine recipients for whom race has been reported. That disparity has grown wider over the past two months, according to a state analysis. Prince George’s lags far behind other counties, with just 8.3 percent of residents having received their first shot as of Thursday. 

………

An equity task force Hogan created released plans on Thursday to target underserved communities with pop-up clinics and other efforts, and solicit ideas from community groups about how best to deliver vaccine doses. The governor acknowledged the state was “not where we need to be with the Black community or the Hispanic community.”

But Hogan also said he believes the state has done far more than others to acknowledge and address racial inequity in vaccine distribution.

“I’m not going to respond to every criticism of every person who does not like what we say or do,” he said.

To quote John Mulaney, “That’s what I thought you’d say you dumb f%$#ing horse.”

Last week, the governor outraged Democratic lawmakers when he said Baltimore City was receiving more doses than it was “entitled to.” 

Yes, massah. 

He’s got more class than Trump, who doesn’t, but he’s pandering to the same racist dirt-bags.

Not Enough Bullets

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In the latest edition of awful Wipipo, we discover that rich white people in te LA area have set up a scheme to secure Covid-19 vaccines intended for poorer and more darkly complected folks, because ……… Karen, I guess.

Color me disgusted:

A California program intended to improve COVID-19 vaccine availability to people in hard-hit communities of color is being misused by outsiders who are grabbing appointments reserved for residents of underserved Black and Latino areas.

The program to address inequities in vaccine distribution relies on special access codes that enable people to make appointments on the My Turn vaccine scheduling website. The codes are provided to community organizations to distribute to people in largely Black and Latino communities.

But those codes have also been circulating, in group texts and messages, among the wealthier, work-from-home set in Los Angeles, The Times has learned. Many of those people are not yet eligible for the vaccine under state rules.

Some people able to make appointments have been driving to Cal State Los Angeles to get the shots.

I know that I have been over-using the phrase lately, but I want to see these folks frog marched out in hand cuffs.

It Would Be Nice if Enlightenment Did Not Require that their Children Spend Weeks Fighting to Breath

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It should not take you child being in agony for you to realize that vaccinations are a good thing:

A brave mother has spoken out about refusing the whooping cough vaccine during her pregnancy and the devastating impact it’s had on her life.

The first time mother later went on to catch the potentially deadly disease and eventually gave it to her newborn baby girl, Eva.

“Within two weeks the cough became pretty scary, horror movie, coughing to the point of going blue, flopping in my hands, can’t breathe, not breathing for three minutes,” the clearly distraught mother explains in the clip.

The emotional mea culpa has since gone viral with more than 90,000 views since it was posted earlier in the day.

“They go red and from red they go blue, sometimes they go a bit black,” the mother laments in the footage speaking about her daughters daily struggles with the illness.

“For a moment there you think they are dead in your hands.”

The stunning admission was posted onto the Gold Coast Health Facebook page issuing a warning to others against making the same mistake she did.

“I’ve been a very healthy pregnant woman, no problems, no complications, worked out, went to gym, ate very healthy, had a natural birth and somehow in the last two weeks of my pregnancy I managed to get whooping cough, I didn’t know,” she said.

The mother admits that after the birth of Eva she went to the doctor about a persistent cough and found out she had whooping cough.

“Unfortunately we have been in hospital for the last three weeks, um, yeah, Eva was diagnosed with whooping cough and yeah, it’s been a nightmare”.

Please, vaccinate your kids, and vaccinate yourselves.

H/t  CT at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

A Bonza Idea from the Aussies

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Parents who are “conscientious objectors” to childhood vaccination will have their childcare and family tax payments stopped from 1 January next year as the federal government attempts to crack down on the anti-vaccination movement.

 Prime Minister Tony Abbott announced on Sunday a loophole would be closed to stop payments to parents worth up to $15,000 per child.

 “Parents who vaccinate their children should have confidence that they can take their children to childcare without the fear that their children will be at risk of contracting a serious or potentially life-threatening illness because of the conscientious objections of others,” Mr Abbott said.

 Although Australia’s overall childhood vaccination rates remain high – about 97 per cent – the numbers of people who are registered conscientious objectors has risen in the past 10 years.

 There are now 39,000 children aged under seven who are not vaccinated because their parents are registered, according to the Australian Childhood Immunisation Register.

This is an increase of more than 24,000 children over the past 10 years.

This is a very good idea.

First, having unvaccinated children in childcare facilities is like smoking exploding cigars at an oil refinery.

Second, the science has thoroughly debunked Dr. Andrew Wakefield’s vaccination-autism link.

Third, much of the anti-vaxx movement is about relying on herd immunity from the rest of society, and so they are moochers.

Forth, it puts those with compromised immune systems, who are medically unable to be vaccinated, at risk.

Finally, children should not  be held hostage to their parents’ idiocy:

Writing on The ScentificParent blog, a chagrined Canadian mom announced that she is leaving the anti-vaxx movement after all of her seven children — four of them completely unvaccinated — have come down with whooping cough.

Writing from quarantine, and surrounded by sick kids, Tara Hills wrote she is “emotionally, a bit raw. Mentally a bit taxed. Physically I’m fine,” before admitting that not only are her own kids sick, but they may have exposed her five-month-old niece who is too young to be fully vaccinated.

What began with a cold brought into her home by her brother-in-law, turned into coughing by her kids leading to full-blown whooping cough in all seven children.

“My youngest three children were coughing so hard they would gag or vomit. I’d never seen anything like this before,” she wrote. ” Watching our youngest struggle with this choking cough, bringing up clear, stringy mucus – I had heard of this before somewhere. My mom said I had it when I was a kid. I snapped into ‘something is WRONG’ mode.”

Jumping onto her computer, she discovered her children’s symptoms matched — almost perfectly — all the symptoms of whooping cough in a household that was woefully under-vaccinated.

“We had vaccinated our first three children on an alternative schedule and our youngest four weren’t vaccinated at all. We stopped because we were scared and didn’t know who to trust,” she explained. ” Was the medical community just paid off puppets of a Big Pharma-Government-Media conspiracy? Were these vaccines even necessary in this day and age? Were we unwittingly doing greater harm than help to our beloved children? So much smoke must mean a fire so we defaulted to the ‘do nothing and hope nothing bad happens’ position.”

Hills explained that she had a hard time overcoming her biases and mistrust of “Big Pharma,” asking herself, “Could all the in-house, independent, peer-reviewed clinical trials, research papers and studies across the globe ALL be flawed, corrupt and untrustworthy?”

Now Hills says that years spent “frozen” out of fear of vaccinating her kids has the whole family frozen: confined to their home by a quarantine.

She said she hopes her mea culpa will make other families who have held back from getting their children vaccinated rethink what they are doing.

“Right now my family is living the consequences of misinformation and fear. I understand that families in our community may be mad at us for putting their kids at risk. I want them to know that we tried our best to protect our kids when we were afraid of vaccination and we are doing our best now, for everyone’s sake, by getting them up to date. We can’t take it back … but we can learn from this and help others the same way we have been helped.”

Preach it, sister.

F%$# Me! I Agree With a Fox News Doctor!

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He’s right, you know

Fox Doc Marc Siegel has condemned the anti-vaxxer movement over the Measels outbreak in Disney Land:

Fox News medical correspondent Marc Siegel lashed out on Thursday at parents who refused to give their kids vaccines for putting everyone else at risk.

Reports this week said that at least 70 cases of measles had been confirmed at Disney theme parks, with 62 of those cases occurring where the anti-vaccination movement is thriving in Orange Country, California.

During his Thursday appearance on Fox News, Siegel, who is an associate professor of medicine at NYU Langone Medical Center, wasted no time in blaming anti-vaxxers for the outbreak.

“Let me be clear on this, I see no debate whatsoever. Period,” Siegel said. “This is the greatest vaccine that has ever been created in the history of vaccines.”

The doctor pointed out that “measles is the most contagious virus known to man.”

Your mouth to God’s ear, Doctor Siegel.

I cannot believe that I am posting a Fox News clip with approval.