COVID - A light on the horizon?

[Gorbles]

I disagree.

Prioritising one' own people and residents here is the duty of the UK government
(particularly when the UK had the highest death rate of sizable countries and a
faster spreading variant), it is not a decision to stuff other people in other countries.

Sure. Which means every other country and union bloc will be thinking along similar lines, and shouldn't be criticised for such

 

[Kyriakos]

I suppose we are lucky that covid happened, because without it we would still think governments didn't care for the people.

 

[thetrooper]

The mighty FDA puts J&J on hold. Same reasons as OAZ.

 

[Bamspeedy]

The mighty FDA puts J&J on hold. Same reasons as OAZ.

Two days before my appointment....

 

[Farm Boy]

They canceled my shot for a one in million. Thier numbers. There are no more available for months. They have convinced me they're ********, I give up. I'm not getting one.

 

[innonimatu]

Vaccines are absolutely a (major) part of the solution. But you strawman away, as usual.

Care to specify where exactly I swawmanned? I only represented you being in denial. Why you are. You're not alone of course. Quite the opposite. As you usually kowtow to whatever narrative the mainstream media happens to be carrying at a given time and make it your opinion, instead of looking at the facts, you're in company with the vast majority of people hoping that the vaccines will end the covid disaster.

If vaccines are a major part of the solution, where is that solution working? Israel? The UK? What in the fall of cases and deaths there is the result of vaccines and what is the result of lockdowns? The lockdowns have not ended there. Even if the vaccines are effective against mutations already circulating and those to come (which I do not believe they will prove to be), the scale of vaccinating people around the world has already been show to be unachievable in the course of several years. There is no going back to "normal" though the vaccination path, there's years of misery ahead even if the best of possible outcomes (vaccines are and remain effective at suppressing the disease) turns out to happen. And the best of outcomes should never be assumed to happen in such a critical issue.
But you seem to be happy with following that path? Already discarded others as impossible. The smart thing to do is to adress this quickly and admit to the structural changes necessary, which are beings one anyway under the premise of "emergency".
But they way they are being done, and the sheer breadth of the changes, in these cyclic lockdowns is far mode damaging that what those who did one to suppress the virus have had to do and enforce since. This strategy is folly.

The incompetents cannot even keep the narrative straight. Now it's another of the hastily pushed vaccines suspended. If vaccines are the salvation how come they're stopped over "a few cases of clots"? If vaccines were tested and evaluated safe why is the story changing from one day to the next and countries simply copying the decisions others make?

And if stopping covid requires lockdowns and controls, why are holes punched on that strategy through "Digital Green Certificates" or whatever? Last year tourism season didn't track anything?

And green certificates? Really? What PR corporation and lobbyist group came up with that name? Should they pay "IP rights" to the pretend-environmentalist band?

Try a simple exercise: identify how many absurd statements are in just this piece of "news".

 

[Gorbles]

Care to specify where exactly I swawmanned?

You made a claim that the vaccine was the solution. I didn't claim that. It was never an argument. You invented it.

As usual, to pursue your isolationist narrative. Because that suits you before Covid, and will suit it afterwards, I'm sure

 

[EnglishEdward]

Now it's another of the hastily pushed vaccines suspended. If vaccines are the salvation how come they're stopped over "a few cases of clots"? If vaccines were tested and evaluated safe why is the story changing from one day to the next and countries simply copying the decisions others make?

The disease has only been about for eighteen months, there is much talk
about long term Covid, but what we have seen is only medium term Covid.

I have the feeling that the scientists are getting quite worried about what
real long term Covid may mean, they may suspect that some of its effects
may occur equally whether exposed to the vaccine or to the live virus itself.

This uncertainty may be being communicated to administrators and politicians
which is why they re getting cold feet and suspending vaccinations.

I doubt the blood clots are the issue, it is to use a Donald Rumsfeld the

Unknown Unknowns

My own view is that having let the virus establish itself globally, there is
now no better alternative to combining vaccines with other measures.

 

[innonimatu]

You made a claim that the vaccine was the solution. I didn't claim that. It was never an argument. You invented it.

As usual, to pursue your isolationist narrative. Because that suits you before Covid, and will suit it afterwards, I'm sure

Isolationist narrative? Isolationism has been one year of "lockdowns". The alternative was (and is) to make a real effort to surpess the virus and the lift most of the limitations imposed on socialization. And there is no indication that vaccines will help supress the virus anytime soon.
The means to do it are within reach and are simpler.

The disease has only been about for eighteen months, there is much talk
about long term Covid, but what we have seen is only medium term Covid.

I have the feeling that the scientists are getting quite worried about what
real long term Covid may mean, they may suspect that some of its effects
may occur equally whether exposed to the vaccine or to the live virus itself.

This uncertainty may be being communicated to administrators and politicians
which is why they re getting cold feet and suspending vaccinations.

I doubt the blood clots are the issue, it is to use a Donald Rumsfeld the

Unknown Unknowns

My own view is that having let the virus establish itself globally, there is
now no better alternative to combining vaccines with other measures.

There is something rotten, that's for sure. It stinks, the incoherence of actions.
There are good alternatives. The chinese suppressed the virus after it had had months to spread in Wuhan. A city larger than the vast majority of European cities, a region larger than most mid-sized countries. The virus can be suppressed if there is an effort to do that. Reduced to a level where any flareup can be quickly detected and squashed, and normal living can return.

And it can only be done country by country, region by region. That was the case from the start, and that was the case also within the large countries that succeeded in suppressing it. Claiming that it cannot be done because it is established around the world, that the world is too large, is defeatist talk to prevent doing it. Do not fall for it!

The long covid fears though - I'm not too worried now. Plenty of survivors and only some seem to have long-term problems. A small minority, considering the number of asymptomatic cases.
What worries me is repeated covid. Because if you play the russian roulette several times it will eventually get you. And imo not suppressing the virus and playing with vaccines and booster shots is playing russian roulette.

 

[innonimatu]

A more extensive overview on this ghoul called Bill Gates and the role he's playing in denying access to medicines to preserve rent collection under the heading "intellectual property". He knows what's good for billionaires and mass murder is not a problem.

"Early on, there was space for Gates to have a major impact in favor of open models,” says Manuel Martin, a policy adviser to the Médecins Sans Frontières Access Campaign. “But senior people in the Gates organization very clearly sent out the message: Pooling was unnecessary and counterproductive. They dampened early enthusiasm by saying that I.P. is not an access barrier in vaccines. That’s just demonstratively false.”

Few have observed Bill Gates’s devotion to monopoly medicine more closely than James Love, founder and director of Knowledge Ecology International, a Washington, D.C.–based group that studies the broad nexus of federal policy, the pharmaceutical industry, and intellectual property. Love entered the world of global public health policy around the same time Gates did, and for two decades has watched him scale its heights while reinforcing the system responsible for the very problems he claims to be trying to solve. The through-line for Gates has been his unwavering commitment to drug companies’ right to exclusive control over medical science and the markets for its products.

“Things could have gone either way,” says Love, “but Gates wanted exclusive rights maintained. He acted fast to stop the push for sharing the knowledge needed to make the products—the know-how, the data, the cell lines, the tech transfer, the transparency that is critically important in a dozen ways. The pooling approach represented by C-TAP included all of that. Instead of backing those early discussions, he raced ahead and signaled support for business-as-usual on intellectual property by announcing the ACT-Accelerator in March.”

One year later, the ACT-Accelerator has failed to meet its goal of providing discounted vaccines to the “priority fifth” of low-income populations. The drug companies and rich nations that had so much praise for the initiative a year ago have retreated into bilateral deals that leave little for anybody else. “The low- and middle-income countries are pretty much on their own, and there’s just not much out there,” said Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine in Houston. “Despite their best efforts, the Gates model and its institutions are still industry-dependent.”

As of this writing in early April, fewer than 600 million vaccine doses have been administered around the world; three-quarters of those in just 10 mostly high-income countries. Close to 130 countries containing 2.5 billion people have yet to administer a single dose. The timeline for supplying poor and middle-income countries with enough vaccines to achieve herd immunity, meanwhile, has been pushed into 2024.
[...]
Technically housed within the WHO, the ACT-Accelerator is a Gates operation, top to bottom. It is designed, managed, and staffed largely by Gates organization employees. It embodies Gates’s philanthropic approach to widely anticipated problems posed by intellectual property–hoarding companies able to constrain global production by prioritizing rich countries and inhibiting licensing. Companies partnering with COVAX are allowed to set their own tiered prices. They are subject to almost no transparency requirements and to toothless contractual nods to “equitable access” that have never been enforced. Crucially, the companies retain exclusive rights to their intellectual property. If they stray from the Gates Foundation line on exclusive rights, they are quickly brought to heel. When the director of Oxford’s Jenner Institute had funny ideas about placing the rights to its COVAX-supported vaccine candidate in the public domain, Gates intervened. As reported by Kaiser Health News, “A few weeks later, Oxford—urged on by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—reversed course [and] signed an exclusive vaccine deal with AstraZeneca that gave the pharmaceutical giant sole rights and no guarantee of low prices.”
[...]
In interview after interview, Gates has dismissed his critics on the issue—who represent the poor majority of the global population—as spoiled children demanding ice cream before dinner. “It’s the classic situation in global health, where the advocates all of a sudden want [the vaccine] for zero dollars and right away,” he told Reuters in late January. Gates has larded the insults with comments that equate state-protected and publicly funded monopolies with the “free market.” “North Korea doesn’t have that many vaccines, as far as we can tell,” he told The New York Times in November. (It is curious that he chose North Korea as an example and not Cuba, a socialist country with an innovative and world-class vaccine development program with multiple Covid-19 vaccine candidates in various stages of testing.)


It was the height of the battle to bring generic AIDS drugs to the developing world. The central front was South Africa, where the HIV rate at the time was estimated as high as 22 percent and threatened to decimate an entire generation. In December 1997, the Mandela government passed a law giving the health ministry powers to produce, purchase, and import low-cost drugs, including unbranded versions of combination therapies priced by Western drug companies at $10,000 and more. In response, 39 drug multinationals filed suit against South Africa alleging violations of the country’s constitution and its obligations under the WTO’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, or TRIPS. The industry suit was backed by the diplomatic muscle of the Clinton administration, which tasked Al Gore with applying pressure. In his 2012 documentary Fire in the Blood, Dylan Mohan Gray notes it took Washington 40 years to threaten apartheid South Africa with sanctions and less than four to threaten the post-apartheid Mandela government over AIDS drugs.
[...]
In Geneva, the lawsuit was reflected in a battle at the WHO, which was divided along a north-south fault line: on one side, the home countries of the Western drug companies; on the other, a coalition of 134 developing countries (known collectively as the Group of 77, or G77) and a rising “third force” of civil society groups led by Médecins Sans Frontières and Oxfam.
[...]
Gates has been tacitly and explicitly defending the legitimacy of knowledge monopolies since his first Gerald Ford–era missives against open-source software hobbyists. He was on the side of these monopolies during the miserable depths of the 1990s African AIDS crisis. He’s still there today, defending the status quo and running effective interference for those profiting by the billions from their control of Covid-19 vaccines.
[...]
“If you said to an ordinary person, ‘We’re in a pandemic. Let’s figure out everyone who can make vaccines and give them everything they need to get online as fast as possible,’ it would be a no-brainer,” says James Love. “But Gates won’t go there. Neither will the people dependent on his funding. He has immense power. He can get you fired from a U.N. job. He knows that if you want to work in global public health, you’d better not make an enemy of the Gates Foundation by questioning its positions on I.P. and monopolies. And there are a lot of advantages to being on his team. It’s a sweet, comfortable ride for a lot of people.”

Gates is the political organized of the pharma rentiers. Do not underestimate his role. If you want to put one face to how badly this vaccination thing is going (why it will not help resolve covid for years even if it all goes wonderfully), and how badly medical research and collaboration on fighting covid is going, you can pictures Bill Gates'. His great work in life is to promote the power of his class (the billionaires). It had been bad enough in software, but he's upgraded the evil in the past couple of decades. Now it doesn't matter how many millions he gets killed in the process. Do keep in mid that the covid vaccines are most the most visible thing on this policy of denial of access to medications to the poor for the sake of higher profits.

 

[Takhisis]

CONMEBOL acquires 50,000 Sinovac vaccines for the continental football tournament known as ‘Copa América’, to be held soon™ in Argentina, with the aid of the president of Uruguay and others.

Clearly football is more important than education or physicians when assigning priorities for vaccination.

 

[Arwon]

Bit disappointing the Socceroos had to withdraw from that tho

 

[Takhisis]

It's always been considered a farce that teams from outside the continent be invited sheerly for the advertising money.

 

[Arwon]

Yeah but it woulda been fun and they haven't played in ages

 

[Takhisis]

Now Argentina has accepted that the autocrats' vaccines aren't coming and its (lack-of)authorities are promising the US that they won't let the Chinese build another military base here if the US sends them a couple million spare vaccines.

This would be the same US that grabbed at some AstraZeneca vaccines that had been shipped to Mexico for bottling before being sent to Argentina. Brilliant minds and clean consciences all around.

 

[Zelig]

Gates is the political organized of the pharma rentiers. Do not underestimate his role. If you want to put one face to how badly this vaccination thing is going (why it will not help resolve covid for years even if it all goes wonderfully), and how badly medical research and collaboration on fighting covid is going, you can pictures Bill Gates'. His great work in life is to promote the power of his class (the billionaires). It had been bad enough in software, but he's upgraded the evil in the past couple of decades. Now it doesn't matter how many millions he gets killed in the process. Do keep in mid that the covid vaccines are most the most visible thing on this policy of denial of access to medications to the poor for the sake of higher profits.

This is reductive to the point where cartoon villains have more depth of character and plausible motivations.

 

[Takhisis]

…but you're quoting innonimatu. What did you expect?

 

[Gorbles]

Isolationist narrative? Isolationism has been one year of "lockdowns". The alternative was (and is) to make a real effort to surpess the virus and the lift most of the limitations imposed on socialization. And there is no indication that vaccines will help supress the virus anytime soon.
The means to do it are within reach and are simpler.

Isolationism is referring to your general foreign policy on the freedom of movement, as mentioned in any thread wherever you can before Covid, and presumably long-after we get a handle on it.

But nice moving on from the strawman without explicitly conceding it.

 

[Kyriakos]

I don't think that now, after a year of lockdowns and curfews, any western state can force a chinese-style full lockdown. There would be a revolution - and rightly so, this is a charade.

 

[thetrooper]

Remember last year and 'gone by April'? Good times!