The “Philanthropist” Bill Gates does charity… towards Big Pharma
About a year after the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation took control of the global response to COVID-19 with the goal of providing "fair access" to a vaccine, Bill Gates & Co. achieved the opposite: The Covid -19 ACT-Accelerator mechanism, supported by the Gates Foundation, is following a declared policy of respecting the exclusive intellectual property rights of Western pharmaceutical manufacturers. This sets aside the solution desired by the WHO, known as the Covid-19 Technology Access Pool, or C-TAP, which was supposed to promote an open source pool of vaccines and pharmaceutical technologies, therefore available to even the poorest economies.
As India's second wave COVID-19 outbreak gets out of control, multiple parties have come forward to criticize Gates for his support for industrial rights protections. Considering the shortage of drugs, there have been increasing demands from countries such as India and South Africa, international relief organizations and other public figures to forgo patents so that poorer countries can gain faster access to vaccines.
Despite pressure to reconsider these positions, Gates insisted on Monday in an interview with Sky News' Sophy Ridge that the proposed removal of vaccine patent rights would not be helpful.
“The thing holding back the productions in this case is not the intellectual property. There is no idle vaccine factory that, with regulatory approval, makes vaccines magically safe. You know, you need to test these things. Each production process has to be considered very carefully, ”explained Gates. “There are all kinds of intellectual property issues that have to do with drugs. But not in terms of how fast we were able to increase the volume here ”.
As Gates sees it, his foundation has helped accelerate the pace of vaccine testing and design for years. In the past, poor nations would likely have taken decades to obtain supplies from the rich states that had designed them. "Generally, in global health it takes a decade between when a vaccine arrives in the rich world and when it arrives in poor countries," Gates said.
While Gates apparently fails to see further how things have been done in the past, critics have quickly pointed out that countries like the United States are already stockpiling more vaccines than they can use. And while Gates insists that there are no factories in the developing world capable of making patented Western hits, but India's Serum Institute is an obvious example of just how wrong the creator of Microsoft is. In addition, many of the countries pushing for the waiver of vaccine intellectual property at the WTO have identified facilities where vaccine production can be rapidly ramped up.
In the Biden government, Katherine Tai, Biden's top commercial official, ruled that Washington would "consider what changes and reforms" can be applied to intellectual property laws. Big Pharma's response was to say that the "Free" vaccine would benefit China and Russia.
In short, Gates wants to help his billionaire friends of the drug. A nice way to do charity, but always for the rich.
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The article The “Philanthropist” Bill gates does charity .. towards Big Pharma comes from ScenariEconomici.it .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/il-filantropo-bill-gates-fa-beneficienza-verso-big-pharma/ on Wed, 28 Apr 2021 06:00:33 +0000.