Covid vaccine’s ARE HEAVY money makers for the few companies that are providing the inoculations …
Controlling their products will lock in their profits for stock holders….
To get things started?
The US Government provided seed money….
What THAT means is going to court…
Moderna and the National Institutes of Health are in a bitter dispute over who deserves credit for inventing the central component of the company’s powerful coronavirus vaccine, a conflict that has broad implications for the vaccine’s long-term distribution and billions of dollars in future profits.
The vaccine grew out of a four-year collaboration between Moderna and the N.I.H., the government’s biomedical research agency — a partnership that was widely hailed when the shot was found to be highly effective. A year ago this month, the government called it the “N.I.H.-Moderna Covid-19 vaccine.”
The agency says three scientists at its Vaccine Research Center — Dr. John R. Mascola, the center’s director; Dr. Barney S. Graham, who recently retired; and Dr. Kizzmekia S. Corbett, who is now at Harvard — worked with Moderna scientists to design the genetic sequence that prompts the vaccine to produce an immune response, and should be named on the “principal patent application.”
Moderna disagrees. In a July filing with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the company said it had “reached the good-faith determination that these individuals did not co-invent” the component in question. Its application for the patent, which has not yet been issued, names several of its own employees as the sole inventors….
…
The dispute is about much more than scientific accolades or ego. If the three agency scientists are named on the patent along with the Moderna employees, the federal government could have more of a say in which companies manufacture the vaccine, which in turn could influence which countries get access. It would also secure a nearly unfettered right to license the technology, which could bring millions into the federal treasury.
The fight comes amid mounting frustration in the U.S. government and elsewhere with Moderna’s limited efforts to get its vaccine to poorer countries. The company, which has not previously brought a product to market, received nearly $10 billion in taxpayer funding to develop the vaccine, test it and provide doses to the federal government. It has already lined up supply deals worth about $35 billion through the end of 2022….
Daily Covid cases have plateaued at 70000-75000 cases a day.
Far far too high to claim that the pandemic is over or even near over.
Except for the MidWest case numbers?
Things have returned to some sense of ‘normalicy’
I repeat
The covid virus, like the flu will ALWAYS be in the background
We will have to reach a tolerance level….
Mandates have for the most part worked well in Illinois, where the state has outperformed the USA average on a per capita death basis.
Mississippi currently leads the country in per capita deaths since the pandemic began and Alabama is right behind it.
Actually cases are spiking now in certain areas and stupid Republicans are still saying they won’t get vaccinated. Go figure.
Yes
The MidWest
Where there are college football games with tens of thousand’s in attendance
Mandates are simply NOT gonna work out there…
They will just ride things thru
It could very easily work by demanding vaccine proof or recent negative results for everyone who enters the stadium. Just a lack of the will to save people’s lives (for fear of misguided popular opinion and evil politicians).
But what’s more important, an Ole Miss fan’s ticket price or his life and health?
Mask mandates are harder to enforce, although necessary when people sit less than six feet (2 yards or 2 metres) apart.
I doubt it would work DSD….
They just do NOT look at things like in other places….
America IS different places….
BTW?
Florida’s numbers are low now….
If you’re right, James, that’s very depressing — that disinformation and ill-founded doubt (let alone, in some cases, paranoia and prejudice) will be killing people.
And if you’re waiting for herd immunity (at the cost of tens of thousands of lives here and tens of millions elsewhere) to somehow, some day, save us from a pandemic turned into an endemic and excuse you from getting vaccinated, then you should also admit that your irresponsibility can easily cause death, injury, pain, and lingering disability to others.
Why?
(Pigheadedness is not a satisfactory answer.)
I’m NOT happy on this one….
But it seems for media reports that this is how it is that region that does NOT like outsiders telling them what to do…..