COVID helped me to lose what trust I had remaining in government institutions. However, my faith in humanity actually grew on net, because of the outstanding success of private individuals and institutions. US Pharma created the COVID vaccine in just two days back in January of 2020! Production takes several months, but by the time it got rolling we were producing tens of millions of vaccines per month, and eventually tens of millions per week. Distribution has gone so well that basically every adult in the US that wants to be vaccinated will be by the end of May.
The US govt got in the way at every step. It wouldn't allow challenge trials, and demanded unnecessarily long, large, and expensive trials. Pharma pays hundreds of millions per drug to gain FDA approval, when initial creation sometimes takes as little as TWO DAYS. The producers were barred from selling the vaccines at market price, instead forced to sell only directly to the govt.
And now Joe Biden wants to remove the vaccine patent protections.
Now, this won't really change anything. The patents already aren't being defended, and the primary production bottleneck is rare inputs, not IP restrictions. The Pharma companies are still making a nice profit. So in that respect, it's a way for Biden to grab approval points without actually hurting the companies that saved us all.
On the other hand, it's pure fucking treachary. These are the people and institutions that literally saved us from a world-wide pandemic the likes of which hasn't been seen in living memory. In response, Biden is advancing the idea that Greedy Big Pharma is behind whatever delays and setbacks have prevented us from already being clear of this, and he'll save us by revoking their IP protections. The protections that the government granted them in the first place to make up for the hundreds of millions of dollars in costs they impose, and many months of delays that killed thousands of people. To take the heroes that brought us out of this and cast them as the villains because your base has a "Kill Capitalists" proganda message is so fucking disgusting to me I have a hard time putting it into words.
Also, it throws into doubt that certainty that future patents will be protected, which will change the calculus of every corporation that has to decide whether its worth spending the millions needed to create these drugs in the first place. It imperils our future salvation, to score a few political points. It's almost criminally short-sighted. I don't even know where to go from here, I just had to rant. This is why I don't vote lizards anymore.