Guerrilla History - Intelligence Briefing: Vaccine Intellectual Property Rights

Episode Date: June 11, 2021

Guerrilla History- Intelligence Briefings will be roughly a twice monthly series of shorter, more informal discussions between the hosts about topics of their choice.  Patrons at the Comrade tier and above will have access to all Intelligence Briefings. This Intelligence Briefing will be a patreon-early access episode, about vaccine intellectual property rights.  Here we talk some history, some current events, and overall just rant back and forth.  A very fun conversation for each of us! Your hosts are immunobiologist Henry Hakamaki, Professor Adnan Husain, historian and Director of the School of Religion at Queens University, and Revolutionary Left Radio's Breht O'Shea. Follow us on social media!  Our podcast can be found on twitter @guerrilla_pod.  Your contributions make the show possible to continue and succeed!  Please encourage your comrades to join us, which will help our show grow. To follow the hosts, Henry can be found on twitter @huck1995, and also has a patreon to help support himself through the pandemic where he breaks down science and public health research and news at https://www.patreon.com/huck1995.  Adnan can be followed on twitter at @adnanahusain, and also runs The Majlis Podcast, which can be found at https://anchor.fm/the-majlis and the Muslim Societies-Global Perspectives group at Queens University, https://www.facebook.com/MSGPQU/.   Breht is the host of Revolutionary Left Radio, which can be followed on twitter @RevLeftRadio cohost of The Red Menace Podcast, which can be followed on twitter at @Red_Menace_Pod.  You can find and support these shows by visiting https://www.revolutionaryleftradio.com/. Thanks to Ryan Hakamaki, who designed and created the podcast's artwork, and Kevin MacLeod, who creates royalty-free music.

You remember Den Bamboo? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello and welcome to a guerrilla history intelligence briefing. Gorilla history is the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history

and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm your host, Henry Huckimacki, and I'm joined by my co-hosts Professor Adnan Hussein, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queens University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing today? I'm doing great, Henry. Good to be with you. Always nice to see you as well. And I'm also joined by religion. Brett O'Shea, host of Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host of the Red Menace podcast. Hello, Brett.

How are you doing? I'm doing great. I'm really happy to be here. And this is the last recording I have before I go on family vacation. So I'm looking forward to that. Ooh, good luck with that. You know, sometimes they go a little bit better than others. And we'll hope that it's one of those ones.

But yeah, so just as a reminder for the listeners, intelligence briefings are our Patreon episodes, one half of them are on early release, like this one, where it'll be on Patreon first and then we'll unlock it for the general audience after a week or two. And the other half are Patreon exclusives. And generally, we have about two a month. So as I said, this is going to be the early access one on Patreon. So if you're listening to this on the general feed, if you want early access, join us on Patreon and help support the show.

But the topic for today is going to be something that it not only has history. historical roots, but it's something that we're seeing very prominently today. And that would be intellectual property rights, specifically on vaccines. Brent, why don't I let you take it away and kind of ground this conversation that we're going to have? Sure. Yeah, obviously this is a really important and timely topic because we're just slowly coming out of a pandemic if you live in certain countries, specifically in the West. I mean, obviously Southeast Asian and East Asia has done very well containing their virus outbreak much better than places like the U.S., the UK, Brazil, etc.

India is still in the fire, if you will, of a second wave of COVID outbreaks. And that raises the question of the vaccines, what they're for, who funds them, who profits off them, and how quickly, in the global pandemic, we can arrest the development of this virus turning into morphing, evolving into other variants. And the question comes up of these vaccines and the ability to sort of take away the intellectual patents on them or, you know, do the trip waiver so that countries around the world can make generic versions of these vaccines, get this disease under control, et cetera. Problem with that, however, is that that would impact the profit margins of largely Western multinational pharmaceutical corporations.

and they are not having it. There's a long history here of these corporations disproportionately influencing global policy when it comes to these pandemics. Joe Biden came out a couple weeks ago and says that he's in favor of the trip's waiver, but that is a meaningless sort of statement that takes no real backup or courage to do. And when push comes to shove, I would be highly suspicious that the Biden administration would actually follow through on such a promise. But it leads into an interesting conversation about these vaccines more broadly and I think capitalism broadly and certain things, whether that's housing, food, medicine, go down

the list, energy, other resources, and what their equitable distribution should be, who should control them, et cetera. And so that opens up, I mean, a bunch of different avenues of discussion. but I'll end it there as an introduction and toss it back over to either of you to pick up whatever thread you want. Yeah, I'll pick that up for a quick second before I let Adnan lay out his opening thoughts because there's a bunch, as an immunobiologist, there's a bunch of different directions I could go with this. And I definitely want to pick back up that trips waiver portion of it a bit later. But I think the important thing to mention here at the front is to pick up that thread

that you laid in terms of variance. Just because understanding why it's important that we have everybody get vaccinated as soon as possible globally. This is important for us to globally combat COVID. Remember, COVID-19 is a global pandemic. I know that those of us that are in the United States suffered particularly badly due to this pandemic because of the utter incompetence when it came to handling the pandemic and dealing with it and curbing it, complete incompetent. competence in the response, complete failure.

So we've suffered particularly badly, but things are starting to get better here in the U.S. and so a lot of us in the West and the U.S. particularly are kind of viewing this pandemic as something that is on its way out the door. It's almost over. It's not the case globally. There was just a new piece that was written, I believe yesterday, and I wish I remembered who wrote it, but the piece basically wanted to go ahead and call COVID at this point. a global South pandemic, as opposed to a global pandemic, because while Western countries are now

seeing high rates of vaccination in severe, significant drops in cases, places like the United States, over 50% of adults have gotten vaccinated already, places like Israel, and that is speaking specifically of the Jews in Israel, they have even significantly higher vaccination rates than that. And the cases, subsequently in both of these areas, have dropped significantly. But as we've mentioned, places like India, although they've seen a drop in their cases in the last week or so, they have high numbers of cases. Brazil still has high numbers of cases. And places in Africa are starting to see their case numbers shoot upwards because only about 2% of people in Africa have gotten the vaccine. And that's because of many different things, production side things, supply side things, distribution.

there's a lot of factors at play here. But, and this is the point that I was going to be driving at, it's important for us to look at this pandemic in a global way, because with coronaviruses, which are RNA viruses, RNA viruses particularly mutate at a very high rate, faster than DNA viruses. Now, coronaviruses as far as RNA viruses go, don't mutate as fast as some,

but that's beyond the scope of this podcast. The point is that coronavirus, are always mutating, always, which is why we keep seeing more and more variants pop up. Now, some of the variants have an increased ability to evade the vaccine, at least to some degree. So variants like B-1351 from South Africa, P1 from Brazil to a smaller degree, B1617.2, which is this new Indian variant, these at least to some degree, deteriorate the efficacy of the vaccines that we have. But we're always seeing mutations. There's nothing stopping these, these viruses, SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, from developing new mutations that

make the vaccine less effective and make people that were immune because of their vaccine, not immune anymore. And so we have to handle this, the pandemic of COVID-19, in a global way, because the longer that we have cases popping up in the global south, the longer that we have or the longer that we're giving the virus opportunities to mutate in ways that will erase the gains that we've made so far. So I just wanted to pick up that thread a little bit before I toss it over to Adnan. So Adnan, why don't I toss it over to you now and let you lay out your ground thoughts before we start talking about intellectual property specifically?

Sure. obviously I am not an immunobiologist, so I certainly appreciate your outlining of some of the immunological questions about variants and so on. But when the possibility of vaccines was first announced by, I don't know if it was Pfizer-Biontech who first made the announcement that they had developed a vaccine, but sometime this last fall in November, I began tweeting right away whether their intellectual property restrictions would be enforced and that the main issue here was whether we could have, you know, independent producers make generic versions of these vaccines because it would be absolutely necessary to roll out the vaccines as quickly as

possible and to make it as widely as possible. You could already foresee that the huge amounts of money that pharmaceutical corporations would make were not necessarily compatible with controlling the pandemic because not all countries, in fact, most countries would not be able to afford the expense of these designer vaccines. And, you know, these designer vaccines. the profits that these companies intended to make out of it. And so I think what we're seeing is, you know, geopolitical concerns or dimensions here that, you know, are worth thinking about. So we have vaccine diplomacy going on.

Like China has sent a lot of its vaccines out to countries in the Middle East, for example. low cost. And that is increasing their geopolitical influence and their close economic relations with neighboring regions of the world. And I think the calculation of the U.S. and of Western Europe is that they want to be well positioned to come out of the pandemic economically and to take advantage of the situation by being ready earlier than other economies. So it seems that we have a real, you know, we have a real problem here that public health is not the primary concern or consideration. Maybe that's no surprise, but it is a real futile approach or perspective for the reasons that you mentioned, Henry, with the development of variance.

And one thing that seems that people are forgetting is how incredibly networked our global economy is. You know, the Suez Canal being blocked for a few days, you know, caused all kinds of disruption. Why? Because there's so much shipping, so much movement of goods, people, and so on, that takes place in the global economy. that there's just absolutely no way anyone can isolate themselves for too long from the spread of this disease if it can evade a vaccine. So this is such short-sighted thinking, highlighting the absolute contradictions between global human welfare and the values, you know, involved with preserving, protecting that and of capitalism.

I want to just throw out there as we're talking now, and this will transition us into the talk of the intellectual property rights on these vaccines specifically. You mentioned the amount of money that these drug companies are making. There was a report that was released by Pfizer within the last month that stated that their earnings from the first three months of this year due to their vaccine were over $3.5 billion in revenue due to a vaccine. that was subsidized in fairly significant part by the German government, those of us who have been following this, remember that Pfizer Biointech were not part of Operation Warp Speed. They didn't get that money from the U.S. government to help develop the vaccine that they're using. Instead, the German government provided a fairly substantial, I believe it was a $500 million grant or 500 million euro probably grant to Pfizer Biointech to develop their vaccine.

It remind me in a little bit, guys, to talk about where the technology to make these vaccines came from initially, because this is a very important point. But before I turn it back over to Brett to say whatever he wants to say now, I just want to lay out, again, Pfizer made $3.5 billion in revenue from this vaccine alone, which was subsidized in large part by the German government. It's projected that over the course of this year, they're going to make over, I believe, some estimates have estimated that it's going to be over $21 billion in revenue from this vaccine alone. This isn't the rest of their drugs that Pfizer makes, just over $21 million or billion in revenue from the vaccine alone. Moderna, meanwhile, another mRNA-based vaccine manufacturer is estimated to make almost $20 billion in revenue from their vaccine alone.

So you said it, Adnan, this is big business. This is a huge, huge cash cow for these companies. And frankly, there wasn't a ton of risk for either of them because Moderna did get the Operation Warp Speed money. Pfizer got the grant from the German government. And both of these companies, as well as Johnson Johnson, AstraZeneca, Novavax to some degree, they've been signing pre-approval obligations to buy, with governments, which means that the governments are signing up on a wait list to buy the vaccine and saying, okay, we're obligated to give you this money and we'll even start giving it to you now. And when the vaccines are approved and manufactured, then you're going to send them to us. What does that mean? Whether or not the vaccine was approved, they were still getting the money, which takes a lot of the risk out of it. And this is something that you hear pretty frequently from people that are defending intellectual property rights as well, you know, they took the risk of developing this thing and they had to put money into it. And if it didn't work, they would have

been out of that money. In this case, that's not the case. They were given the money up front, both in terms of grants to develop it, as well as these obligations to buy the vaccine. They were getting that money, whether the vaccines ended up working out or not. So these companies weren't really going to be out of money. Brett, why don't I turn it over to you? Yeah, you touched on some stuff that I had planned, but I mean, I'll just echo them in different way. So here in the U.S., right, you're thinking about the amount of money that went into Operation Warp Speed. And it was of initially $10 billion. It got up to $18 billion. This is American taxpayer money being fronted to these pharmaceutical corporations with the guarantee that this money

is theirs, as Henry said, even if the vaccines don't work. So you have literally people who pay taxes funding this research and development only so that these corporations can then see the profit, putting their personal profit over the health and well-being of human beings globally, which again comes back and affects the American taxpayer in the form of the possibility of continued development of variance that these so already created vaccines don't necessarily protect against as much as they would have otherwise. So we're really seeing, you know, we talk about social production and individual appropriation, we are seeing that the entire argument from the side of these corporations that they're the ones that take the

risk and therefore deserve profit as compensation for that risk taking is completely obliterated. No, the American people, the American taxpayer in the case of many of these vaccines, the German taxpayers and others, and we could go to different countries down the line, they cushioned risk almost completely away, guaranteeing the profits of these corporations the entire way. So that argument falls completely on death ears. And another argument that you'll hear a lot, just from pharmaceutical corporations more broadly, is that aside from the risk, they're the ones that invest so much money in research and development. And they're the ones that create innovations meant to help people. Therefore, they can set the prices

where they want. And remember, these are often monopolies or shared monopolies, which means that there's no real competitive pressure downward on prices. They can set the price wherever they want and profit as much as they want because they themselves take the risk and they themselves invest in research and development. But I found it very interesting. And I encourage people to go check this out. Representative Katie Porter recently had a pharmaceutical corporation CEO on the House on the floor of Congress. And she was pressuring this idea. You know, you guys say that you deserve all these billions in profits because you invest in research and development.

And she made a little whiteboard graph showing that actually only a tiny fraction of the revenue that these corporations have that they bring in gets funneled back into research and development. In fact, more money gets funneled into marketing and advertising, tens of billions of dollars every year just in advertising these medicines on American television, which is why you can't watch cable news for more than five, or cable TV more than five minutes without seeing some pharmaceutical corporation commercial of hawking their product. And then she's like a huge amount of that is also stock buybacks and dividends, settlements, buying politicians, and literally

using profits to lobby the government to make it harder to do things like wave intellectual patent rights or put any regulation on the amount of price hikes that these pharmaceutical corporations can engage in. So this is, robbery, this is criminal, people are dying, and a small amount of human beings are profiting enormously off the sweat, fear, misery, and money of billions of other human beings on the planet. And so it's grotesque in every way. Well, I have an even more perverse thought about how the interests align here, which is that not only do these companies have the short-term interest of not having to share profits by generics being produced. They also, of course, have a longer

term interest in the principle of maintaining intellectual property. You know, in the long term, they don't want this principle to be violated so that they can continue for these drugs and for others to control the profits and control the production. And we saw how the Gates Foundation, you know, ended up putting pressure on the developers of the AstraZeneca vaccine not to share the formula and so on in order to maintain that principle of intellectual property. But I think they have an even term interest specifically in the COVID-19 pandemic for variants because it creates the need for continuing research and development of new vaccines, boosters, and adjustments to the original, you know, MRNA formula, and so on,

but also to turn it into something like an annual flu shot for at least some period of time that everybody will have to keep getting boosters. So they don't actually have, it seems to me, an interest. I don't know if this is, you know, actually operating. in any genuine sort of way, but I can't help but think that when you privatize, you know, when you privatize something that's so crucial and important for the public interest in this way,

there's no reason for them to cooperate. And they will put absolutely every effort into maintaining their private control of this because, you know, they're sacrificing other people's health, lives, you know, the logic of it, it seems to me. And I, you know, it's a perverse thought to think that they might have an interest in variants popping up because it continues to require their, you know, vaccines over and over again. But that, I can't help but thinking that way if you follow the logic of, of capitalist markets.

that's a fair point odd non and i'm not going to get into you know whether i think that that's the case or not because um we're talking about a science topic and i'm a scientist so i don't want to sound too conspiratorial on this um i do have my own opinions on that people can feel free to ask me on their own time but what i will say is that we're certainly going to need at least one booster at least um it's almost certain that those of us that are in western countries that are going to have access to the vaccines very early on are going to need to need to need to at least a booster that has the E484K mutation within it. We already know that. And whether or not more mutations or variants pop up in the upcoming months and perhaps even years, we could

potentially need even more than just that one booster. Would you guys mind if I just ranted for a little bit? It's not on that exact point. Okay, I see the thumbs up from the guys. Okay, here we go. Intellectual property rights on medicines is one of the things. that frustrates me the most because, as we've talked about, when people are citing intellectual property rights and patent rights, it's because I took the risk, I did the research, I deserve to reap rewards from it. That is not the full story. Okay, most of the research, well over 50% of the basic research, and it's called basic, not because it's easy, but because it doesn't lead immediately to a product. But it's the base level research that has to be done in order to

eventually end up with a pharmaceutical for treating something. Well over half of the basic research that's done is in public institutions, universities and government-run institutions like the NIH or the National Cancer Institute or whatever, well over half of the basic research. And in fact, right around half of the finished pharmaceutical drugs that come out in terms of not the production, but in terms of the creation of the drug itself, are still done in public institutions like universities and government-sponsored labs and whatnot. So what does this mean? It means that you, through your taxes, are paying for the development of these drugs only for pharmaceutical companies to buy up the patent rights or intellectual property rights

in order to mass produce them and sell them to you at inflated prices so that they can make a profit. Let's look at an analogy for this. For example, let's say you're a farmer. You buy 10 baby dairy cows because you want to have milk, right? And you buy 10 of them because, you know, you're just starting out in your farming and the weather is harsh. You don't know how many of the cows are going to make it through there. So you've got to get 10 because then maybe you'll end up with three that'll get to the age where you can get milk from them. So you buy these 10 cows. Some of them end up dying off. But over the course of years, you're putting money and effort into cultivating these cows. So this would be like the basic research being done at

the public universities and government-run labs. So you're raising these cows, you're putting your money in, your resources and your effort in, your labor in, only for when the cow is just about to be at the right age to be producing milk, one of the big, you know, dairy corporations of the United States or wherever looks at it and says, you know, this cow is going to make it. It's going to come through and it's going to be able to produce milk. I'll give you $10 for that cow. And then in three years time, you can buy milk.

from me at the same price that I would sell it to anybody else at. Well, you raised that cow from the ground up. You paid for that cow to be up. All that the big dairy landlord did is they took the cow in and they squeezed the teat. How does it feel? I have it raising the cow all the way up to the end only for somebody else to squeeze the teat for you so that you can buy the milk back from them. That's essentially what happens in pharmaceuticals. The universities, which are funded by your tax dollars, do all of the basic research or much of the basic research. Only for these pharmaceutical companies to swoop in, pick up all of the drugs that look promising, patent them, intellectually property rights, intellectual property and patent rights, put those on them

so that then the people of the country that originally sponsored that research to take place, they have to pay for it anyway. You get bit on both ends. And it's even worse than that. Because when these intellectual property rights and these patents are put on these drugs, they're put in a way that even when the patent is broken or ages out, a lot of the required information is not present. So you'd think that in the way that it used to work is that when you would patent something, you would submit your patent design to the government. The government would then take that information and they would hold it. And you would have your exclusive rights to produce that for however many years. Then when the patent timed out, what would happen is the government

would take that plan and say, it's up for grabs for generics. Anybody can make it now. Here's the patent. Here's the plan. You can make it. That changed. There was two acts that were done. There was the Uniform Trade Secrets Act of 1985 and the U.S. Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2016. And what they did is they allowed for the protection of some specific components in this process so that they didn't have to be disclosed to the government. They could be stored elsewhere. In the journalist Alexander Zichick, who is a good journalist, I would recommend reading his stuff.

He does a lot of the New Republic. He once compared this to, you've got a burger place that wants to patent their burger recipe, but they don't have to disclose their secret sauce recipe. because it's really the thing that sets them apart from everyone else. So even when the patent on making the burger just like that, you know, making the Henry's burger, that patent is up.

I still, I never had to disclose the information on how to make my secret sauce. So even though it's not patented anymore, people would still have to figure out how to make the sauce on their own. Now, if you're looking at a secret sauce on a burger, that doesn't really matter. It's a sauce on a burger.

When we're talking about a life-saving drug, on the other hand, that required years of basic research to get to the point where they're able to make it. It's a much bigger deal, and these companies are doing the same thing, where they'll keep certain components of their production process, their quality control processes, some of the chemicals that they use, they'll withhold that information from the government when they file for the patent. So even when these drugs come out of patent, people still don't know how to make them,

and we can't get generics anyway. So that's one of the issues with Moderna, for example, and I'm sorry for ranting so long. I'll wrap up in a second. One of the issues with like Moderna, for example, Moderna announced that they're not going to be enforcing their intellectual property rights on their vaccine, which made them sound really good. You know, hey, Moderna, they're not enforcing intellectual property rights. Sounds like anybody that has the ability to make that vaccine can now make that vaccine if somebody had the will to. Two problems with that. One, precursor chemicals for those vaccines are really hard to come by.

They're in very short supply. It's one of the reasons why production takes so long, not that it's, you know, slow. We've actually been going very fast, but relatively speaking, it could be faster if we had more of these component parts. So there's not enough of those to go around. But then the other thing is they've withheld information on how to make it. So you have these generic vaccine manufacturers that could, in theory, make it that have no idea how to make it. And that's despite the fact that, again, the basic research, here was done at a public institution. We're talking about

mRNA-based vaccines, Moderna and Pfizer. The basic mRNA vaccine technology was being developed in the beginnings all the way back in 1990. It was five years before I was born. There was researchers looking at using MRI delivery methods to produce proteins and animals. That's the exact same thing that these vaccines are doing. And they developed it over the course of the last 31 years until now, We have operational human vaccines that operate with this technology.

Moderna and Pfizer use this technology that was developed over the course of decades, and they're the ones that are able to patent it and profit from it, whereas the institutions like University of Wisconsin, who was doing this research back in 1990, they don't get any royalties from the Pfizer vaccine. Pfizer bought up the rights to the vaccine that the vaccine that was being, generated by bio-n-tech that was using the technology from over the last 30 years. Anyway, I do have more to say, but I'll let you guys talk.

Yeah, I think that's incredibly important to understand. Really well laid out there, Henry. This is criminal. I mean, this is robbery. This is by any reasonable standard, this should be fucking illegal. And this is the system that we're operating in. And again, it's important to remember that this is not the result of, individual greed or a few clever people conspiring to make money, this is inherent in the

incentive structures of capitalism itself. And the state in a capitalist society is not a neutral entity that mediates between different interests. It is a manifestation of the dictatorship of capital, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and it serves its interests first and foremost. And when there are concessions made to regular people on a multitude of fronts, it's not because they're a neutral entity that cares about interest in both sides, it's because they are doing what they have to do to maintain the overall structure of dominance. And we have to get to a point, especially with climate change, pandemics are going to become more and more common as population grows. We go into new areas around the world and set up housing and stuff.

We have to get to the point where we understand that crucial resources like medicine, like land, like housing, like energy cannot be in the hands. hands of a few small corporations whose main incentive is to make profit for themselves and their shareholders. It has to be communally managed and held in a collective level, global level, with the interests of human well-being, primary and center, not the profit of a couple huge corporations. It's going to become increased, this contradiction. I mean, this is revealing a core contradiction at the center of capitalism, and it's only going to keep being revealed to us until we do something to resolve it. And the last thing I'll say on this front is the,

you know, I always like to bring this up in this discussion. Jonas Salk, you know, the inventor of the polio vaccine is, is an exception to the rule here. He was somebody who, you know, really was behind that final push to invent the vaccine for polio. And he famously, as is well known, opened it up, did not do a patent and allowed the, the, the, world to replicate this polio and polio has more or less been eradicated in most parts of the world and when asked by an interview who owns the patent on this vaccine jonas salk said well the people own it i would say there is no patent could you patent the sun now this is an example of one sort of scientist doing the right thing but we have to create an incentive structure a society

a regulatory framework that makes this the norm not the exception to the rule I couldn't agree more. That was wonderfully laid out by both of you. And just to clarify, likewise, I was certainly not alleging that there is any specific or deliberate attempts to prolong the pandemic, but only that it doesn't serve the private companies who are developing these vaccines, the pharmaceutical companies, it doesn't serve their interest to share. the knowledge or to eradicate the pandemic quickly. And this is a contradiction that is exactly why we need to get to the sort of system that you're talking about, Brett, where these developments, or you cannot privatize this sort of knowledge and you cannot control as a result the profits

in a profit market-oriented system of that controlled knowledge should be public and the benefits should be public. That's absolutely the kind of system that we need to have. I guess my only real question in the interim is whether or not the exigencies of such an emergency of a global pandemic currently would allow, what are the mechanisms for overriding any of the kind of private control? I mean, is it possible for the WHO or for other international bodies, you know, you know within the kind of system of global capitalist governance you know the you know WTO and others are there ways to just override this as a result of this being an emergency situation what opportunities are there obviously it's not going to happen without like political

leaders you know pushing for it but I wonder if there are mechanisms that could put public health globally back into the primary position rather than privileging, you know, private profits. I could take that odd none. And then I'll give you each the opportunity for the last word on the conversation. But this does lead it to something that, again, it's going to be a minor rant. It's not going to be as long as the last one. Don't worry. But something that I think is very important. Okay. So before I mention about how we could get rid of these intellectual property rights that are hurting people. Let me just talk about very briefly how many people want this. There's a poll that came out relatively recently that showed that 60% of people that were polled wanted or were

supporting a trip suspension. So that would be one of the intellectual property rights suspensions just during the duration of the pandemic on these vaccines for low and middle income countries. That poll found that 72% of Democrats wanted it and 50% of Republicans wanted it. Only 36% of Republicans said disagree. The rest were undecided, obviously. So you have at least 50% of both Democrats and Republicans in favor of waiving intellectual property rights at the World Trade Organization level for the duration of the pandemic. So now to the question of how do we do this. There's a couple of ways that we can do it. The one that is now currently being looked at, which is not as good of a solution as my other, the second thing I'll talk

about. The one that's being looked at now is this TRIPS waiver, which is an intellectual property rights waiver that would be granted through the World Trade Organization. It's real close to happening. We're very, very close to breaking these intellectual property rights on these vaccine so that generic manufacturers in middle income countries like India, for example, the biggest vaccine manufacturer in the world is based in India. It's called the Serum Institute of India. Feel free to look it up sometime. You've probably gotten a vaccine from them at one point. These countries would then be able to produce the vaccine if they had the capacity to do so, which of course would require some rejiggering of some machinery and getting those precursor

chemicals out to them or perhaps letting them know how to make the precursor chemicals themselves, it's very close to happening. Most of the countries in the world, the vast majority, are in favor of granting these trips waivers. And even Joe Biden, of all people, said that he was in favor of granting the trips waivers. The problem is, is at the World Trade Organization level, for these trips waivers to be granted, it has to be unanimous among the countries represented on the board of the WTO. WTO. And Anhele Merkel, who, in case the listeners, don't remember, is a deeply conservative politician. I know she's portrayed as the bastion of liberalism here in the United States and the defender of the European Union and all of that. She is a deeply conservative

politician from a Christian Democratic Party, Christian Democratic Union. She's a conservative of politician. She's come out and said, I don't support this. And because it has to be unanimous, she alone would be able to prevent these trips waivers from being granted, which would mean that these generic vaccine manufacturers couldn't make them. It's on Helimerical. Okay. So if we were able to kind of twist her arm in a way that would convince her to do it and we got all of the other people to hold the line and say, yeah, grant the trips waivers, then yes, that would be one way. There is another method, though, and I want to make sure that I get the opportunity to just mention it because it's one of the things that I've been an activist for the longest. I've been an activist for this specific issue since probably 2014 or so, and I was pretty young at that time.

It's called compulsory licensing. Now, what is compulsory licensing? It's quite simple. It's the way for essentially the government to unilaterally break a patent or break intellectual property rights without consent of the company that holds those intellectual property rights in order for generics to be made. And obviously it would only be done in situations in which it's required. So, for example, if the WTO thing doesn't come across, India, for example, for example, example could say, okay, we're going to grant a compulsory license anyway. We're going to let the Serum Institute of India start producing these vaccines. Now, of course, they'd run afoul of the

WTO when they'd face repercussions for it, but let's say people forgave them. They'd be able to produce the vaccines there unilaterally. And it's something that's been enshrined in domestic laws for decades, really. And the reason I brought up India is because there's two examples that I can provide of these compulsory licenses that happened, one that happened and one that was threatened, and you'll see exactly how they work. So in India, back in 2012, there was a company, it was Bayer, the German drug company, had a patent on a cancer drug. India has a generic drug manufacturer that had the capacity to make this cancer drug. Byer was charging exorbitant rates that the Indian people could not afford for this cancer drug. India said, our people need this cancer drug. So either negotiate your

prices down so that we can afford them or we're going to grant a compulsory license so this generic manufacturer can make it. By your said, you're not actually going to do that. Well, India said, well, yeah, actually we are. And they did. They granted this compulsory license and this generic drug maker in India started producing this generic cancer drug for pennies on the dollar and the people in India can now afford this cancer drug that was previously inaccessible to them due to price as upheld by buyer. Now, there's another instance, and this is the last thing I'll say, and the U.S. actually was involved here. And it's not a vaccine, but the process would be the same. In 2001, for those of you who don't remember, there was anthrax attacks in the United States.

Shortly after 9-11, it was mostly in November of 2001. These letters were going out in the mail with anthrax in them. And a lot of people were worrying that there was going to be thousands and thousands of anthrax letters out there and that people across the country were going to be needing the treatment for anthrax. Of course, it never came to that, but that was what the worry was at the time. The treatment for anthrax is an antibiotic called Cyprofloxacin. It's a very harsh antibiotic, but it works pretty darn good against anthrax and not much else does. So, Cyprofloxacin was patented by, I believe that was also buyer in Germany. Yeah, in fact, it was now that I'm thinking about it.

It was buyer in Germany. And the United States didn't have a stockpile of Cyprofloxicin. So they needed to get more. They needed to get a bunch more. Buyer said, well, you know, you need a bunch more. We're going to charge you a lot for that. The United States said, we need a bunch. It's a public health emergency.

buyer said, no, no, no, you're going to pay us a lot. United States said, okay, remember this compulsory licensing thing? We're going to do that to you. And the United States is going to start producing Cypro-Flaxisin within the United States. And obviously, we have a lot of drug manufacturers that would have the ability to make Cypro. And you are not going to have the patent on Cypro in the U.S. anymore. How do you like them, apples? Buyer said, okay, here you go.

You can have Cypro for a quarter of the price that we were selling it to you before. And the U.S. never actually carried out the compulsory license. Just the threat of it was enough to drive down the price to an acceptable level. So the bottom line here, and this will be the last thing I say, and then I'll let the guys have the final word on this conversation and we'll wrap up. The bottom line is, is there are other mechanisms that can be taken to break these intellectual property rights, especially in the times of a public health crisis when we need these drugs, we need these vaccines in order to keep people safe and healthy and to get us back to normal. Compulsory licensing is my preferred method. It's never been done on a vaccine before,

but it has been done on other drugs. So what I would encourage everybody listening to this to do, if you're still listening after my long rants, if you're still listening, read up on compulsory licensing. There's a lot of, not a lot, there's a decent amount of articles out about compulsory licenses, and then write to your U.S. representatives and senators encouraging them, to exercise compulsory licensing in the instances of public health emergencies on drugs or vaccines that are applicable to those emergencies. And of course, the COVID-19 pandemic and the vaccines that will get us out of this pandemic would fall into that category.

And I would highly encourage all of you to write to your representatives and senators telling them, if you can't get this through the WTO, grant the compulsory license to these countries and allow them to make the generics themselves. well i don't think there's really much more to be said on this topic than that henry that is absolutely what we should be doing and i think we should be encouraging all our listeners to take up that cause for compulsory licensing it's a matter of public health global solution really to um you know the prolongation of this of this pandemic so i can't add anything more. I'm absolutely 100% with you, Henry. I'm glad you pointed out that there were mechanisms

and there are mechanisms available to us to expand the production and to overcome these intellectual property laws that are constraining the ability of the world, really, to recover from this pandemic as quickly as possible. Yeah, really interesting stuff. I actually do have one or two more things they add, I'll be very quickly. I just wanted to circle back around to the idea earlier of like, is it conspiratorial if they let variance flourish because it is in their long-term economic interest, et cetera. One thing we do have to remember is to be a CEO or a top member of these huge corporations, your whole thing is being very clever and strategic, thinking short, medium, long-term, all in the interest of maximizing profits as much as you possibly can. That's how you

become successful in that industry, in that position, et cetera. So the short-term planning for them, which is just conscious and obvious, is that these intellectual property patents protect their profits, and so they're going to maintain them. Now, a downstream effect of maintaining them at all costs is the fact that less people will get unvaccinated and the timeframes we need to prevent more variance from flourishing. And so just by sitting back and protecting their profits in the short term, they are allowing nature to run its course, which will in many likely trajectories and scenarios lead to long-term abilities for them to make more profit. So it doesn't have to be a conspiratorial thing, but you know these people think ahead. They're not oblivious to this

conversation. It's not like they've nobody's brought this point of, right, in their little interim meetings that are secretive and about maximizing profits. So it doesn't have to be conspiratorial and they don't actually have to do anything by doing what's in their short term economic profiteering interest, they create a trajectory that possibly down the line will allow them to make even more money. So just food for thought on that front. The last thing I wanted to say is just going back to the anthrax thing. Isn't it very strange how we pretty much never figured out why somebody did that? Who did it? Now there is some people, there's a suspect and I want to read quickly from the 2001 anthrax attack Wikipedia page. And this is just a bigger question

mark than me implying anything. But I'll just read from the page. A major focus in the early years of the investigation was bio-weapons expert Stephen Hatfield, who was eventually exonerated. Bruce Edwards Ivins, a scientist at the government's biodefense labs at Fort Detrick and Frederick Maryland, became the focus around April 4th, 2005. On April 11, 2007s, Ivan's was put under periodic surveillance in an FBI document stated that he was, quote, unquote, an extremely sensitive suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks. On July 29th, 2008, Ivan's died by suicide with an overdose of a set of metaphim. Federal prosecutors declared Ivan's the sole culprit one month later, based on DNA evidence leading to an anthrax vile in his lab.

Two days later, Chuck Grassley and Rush D. Holt Jr., called for hearings into the Department of Justice and FBI's handling of the investigation, but the FBI closed their investigation in 2010. It's just a very interesting thing that one of the biggest attacks, you know, in the heated, insane months after 9-11 was just never quite found out and all the best evidence that they were to come up with and made public traced it back to the government's biodefense labs and somebody named Bruce Ivins. So just a very interesting thing to note and maybe look into more if you're interested. But I think we covered a lot of really interesting territory and I hope we laid some important things to think about when having these discussions because so much of like the insider baseball that Henry was pointing to about how this science and the basic tech is made

plus the taxpayer infusions of money to reduce risk to almost zero for these companies. That is really essential to understand going forward and to make sense of this entire debacle. And I'll just add that acetaminifin overdoses are both the worst way that you can overdose if you were going to commit suicide, which of course, listeners, if you are experiencing those suicidal ideations, there are ways to get help. And of course, I would highly recommend you seek those methods out rather than to do something drastic that is going to harm you, your health, as well as those around you that love you. So that's just my disclaimer on that. But acetaminophen toasts your liver, and that's why you die. It's a very slow and excruciating

death, absolutely terrible. So, you know, very interesting nonetheless. But on that note, On that very somber note, why don't we wrap up this conversation on intellectual property rights on vaccines? Thanks, guys, for the conversation. Adnan, how can our listeners find you on social media as well as your other podcast? Well, please follow me on Twitter at Adnan A. Hussein, H-U-S. listen to my other podcast called The Mudgellis, if you're interested in the Middle East, Islamic World, Muslim Diasperas. That's M-A-J-L-I-S on all the platforms. Excellent. And Brett, how can the listeners find you and what you've been working on?

You can find everything I do at Revolutionary Left Radio.com. Excellent. Highly recommend that, of course, as always. As for me, listeners, if you feel like listening to me anymore than you already did, today. You can follow me on Twitter at Huck1995. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com forward slash Huck1995, where I write about immunology and public health. And you can follow our show on Twitter at Gorilla underscore Pod, G-E-R-R-I-L-A underscore pod. And support us on Patreon. If you're listening to this on the general feed, patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history, again, with two hours. So that'll be it for this intelligence briefing of guerrilla history. Until next time, Solidarity.

Thank you.