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Covid-19 - Treatments & Vaccines

The UK not putting the US on their initial rollout of green listed countries is bullshit. It's time for the US and UK to get together and establish a travel corridor. Doesn't really motivate continued vax efforts if we still can't travel anywhere once vaccinated.
 
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/today-i-sent-letter-have-candid-conversation-our-drivers-bourla

Dear Colleagues,

The recent announcement that the United States Trade Representative will discuss options to waive some COVID-19 vaccine intellectual property (IP) rights has created some confusion to the world. Has Pfizer done enough to ensure fair and equitable distribution of our COVID-19 vaccine? Is the proposed waiver going to bring solutions or create more problems? I am writing to you today to discuss these questions.

Fair and equitable distribution was our North Star from day one. In order to ensure that every country can have access to our COVID-19 vaccine two conditions had to be met: a price that anyone can afford and reliable manufacturing of enough vaccine for all.

The first condition was met in the early days. Back in June of 2020 we decided to offer our vaccine through tiered pricing. The wealthier nations would have to pay in the range of about the cost of a takeaway meal and would offer it to their citizens for free. The middle-income countries were offered doses at roughly half that price and the low-income countries were offered doses at cost. Many of the poorest communities will receive their doses through donation. Equity doesn’t mean we give everyone the same. Equity means we give more to those that need more.

Meeting the second condition was much more challenging but we are getting there with remarkable speed. Thanks to the ingenuity and hard work of our scientists, engineers and skilled workers, and multibillion dollars of Pfizer investment, we announced that we will provide to the world more than 2.5 billion doses in 2021. In fact, our internal target is 3 billion doses, so we feel quite comfortable about our commitment. Achieving 3 billion doses this year means, by extrapolation, 4 billion doses in 2022. These doses are not for the rich or poor, not for the north or south. These are doses for ALL. We have concluded agreements to supply 116 countries and we are currently in advanced negotiations with many more for a total of approximately 2.7 billion doses in 2021. Upon finalization of all agreements, we expect that 40% of them, or more than 1 billion doses, will go to middle- and low-income countries in 2021.

This clearly poses another question. Until today, we have shipped approximately 450 million doses and the balance is more favorable to high income countries. Why is that? When we developed our tiered pricing policy, we reached out to all nations asking them to place orders so we could allocate doses for them. In reality, the high-income countries reserved most of the doses. I became personally concerned with that and I reached out to many heads of middle/low-income countries by letter, phone and even text to urge them to reserve doses because the supply was limited. However, most of them decided to place orders with other vaccine makers either because mRNA technology was untested at that time or because they were offered local production options. Some didn’t even approve our vaccine. Unfortunately, other vaccine producers were not able to meet their supply commitments for varying technical reasons. Most of the countries that did not choose us initially, came back and thanks to our phenomenal supply ramp up, we have started signing supply agreements with them. We expect the supply balance to weigh in their favor in the second half of 2021, and to have virtually enough supply for all in 2022.

Last week, I had the opportunity to provide these facts to the US Trade Representative and explain why the suggested waiver of IP rights could only derail this progress. Which brings me to the second question. Is the proposed waiver going to improve the supply situation or create more problems? And my answer is categorically the latter.

When we created our vaccine there was no manufacturing production of any mRNA vaccine or medicine anywhere in the world. We had to create manufacturing infrastructure from scratch. With 172 years of quality manufacturing tradition, substantial deployment of capital, and more importantly, an army of highly skilled scientists, engineers and manufacturing workers, we developed in record time the most efficient manufacturing machine of a life-saving vaccine that the world has ever seen. Currently, infrastructure is not the bottleneck for us manufacturing faster. The restriction is the scarcity of highly specialized raw materials needed to produce our vaccine. These 280 different materials or components are produced by many suppliers in 19 different countries. Many of them needed our substantial support (technical and financial) to ramp up their production. Right now, virtually every single gram of raw material produced is shipped immediately into our manufacturing facilities and is converted immediately and reliably to vaccines that are shipped immediately around the world (91 countries to date.) The proposed waiver for COVID-19 vaccines, threatens to disrupt the flow of raw materials. It will unleash a scramble for the critical inputs we require in order to make a safe and effective vaccine. Entities with little or no experience in manufacturing vaccines are likely to chase the very raw materials we require to scale our production, putting the safety and security of all at risk.

And I would like to make a final point. I worry that waiving of patent protection will disincentivize anyone else from taking a big risk. We deployed $2 billion before we knew whether we could successfully develop a vaccine because we understood what was at stake. Just recently, I authorized spending an additional $600 million on COVID-19 research and development that will bring our total spend for R&D in 2021 to more than $10 billion . The recent rhetoric will not discourage us from continuing investing in science. But I am not sure if the same is true for the thousands of small biotech innovators that are totally dependent on accessing capital from investors who invest only on the premise that their intellectual property will be protected.

Ending the pandemic and vaccinating the world is a massive, but achievable undertaking. We remain fully focused on getting high-quality, safe and effective vaccines to patients all over the world as quickly as possible and to putting an end to this deadly pandemic. Once again, we will not let politics stand in our way and we will continue doing what we do best – creating breakthroughs that change patients’ lives.

I'm surprised at the restraint being shown by Pfizer here. Failure to protect their IP by waiving patent protections is basically government sanctioned theft of the property of a private company.

And I think he makes a great argument that there are pretty much only 2 companies capable of producing mRNA vaccines at scale right now, and a disruption of their supply chains is inefficient compared to allowing a free for all by other players.

Good luck getting a private company to put their own money at risk AND provide for cheap purchasing by the government in the future.
 
You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to Liquid Karma again.
 
Covid-19 - Treatments & Vaccines

All of this speaks to why we need a global pandemic response plan that addresses these issues up front instead of a case by case basis. Negotiate all this well in advance.
 
India has supposedly vaccinated over 160 million people. That is a staggering raw number when you think of the logistical challenges they face with transport, refrigeration, delivery facilities. It's more than we have vaccinated. And yet it is still just over 10% of their population.

Also, pretty fascinating to see what states are doing the best. Would like to see this adjusted to remove the population of each state under the age of 16. I imagine that moves more than a handful of states north of 50%.

https://www.beckershospitalreview.c...entage-of-population-vaccinated-march-15.html
 
India has supposedly vaccinated over 160 million people. That is a staggering raw number when you think of the logistical challenges they face with transport, refrigeration, delivery facilities. It's more than we have vaccinated. And yet it is still just over 10% of their population.

Also, pretty fascinating to see what states are doing the best. Would like to see this adjusted to remove the population of each state under the age of 16. I imagine that moves more than a handful of states north of 50%.

https://www.beckershospitalreview.c...entage-of-population-vaccinated-march-15.html

NC supposedly just cleared 50% of eligible adults….
 
India has supposedly vaccinated over 160 million people. That is a staggering raw number when you think of the logistical challenges they face with transport, refrigeration, delivery facilities. It's more than we have vaccinated. And yet it is still just over 10% of their population.

Also, pretty fascinating to see what states are doing the best. Would like to see this adjusted to remove the population of each state under the age of 16. I imagine that moves more than a handful of states north of 50%.

https://www.beckershospitalreview.c...entage-of-population-vaccinated-march-15.html

[cough] Placebo [/cough]
 
Sure, why not? I've ingested worse things than a placebo (that's what she said), and if it helps me personally to not have to wear a mask by saying I'm vaxxed and us collectively to get past this media and politically driven misinformation farce then shoot me up again. I'll do my part to try to overcome our national stupidity.
 
So just to be clear, you believe you received a “vaccine” that was really not a vaccine.
 
Sure, why not? I've ingested worse things than a placebo (that's what she said), and if it helps me personally to not have to wear a mask by saying I'm vaxxed and us collectively to get past this media and politically driven misinformation farce then shoot me up again. I'll do my part to try to overcome our national stupidity.

You're the reason we can't have nice things.
 
So just to be clear, you believe you received a “vaccine” that was really not a vaccine.

I believe I received a vaccine that was politically rushed through approval, not fully studied, unsupervisingly manufactured and distributed, and questionably long-term effective against an illness to which I had minimal risk for any material symptoms in the first place.

Does it provide me with any medical benefit? Maybe a little in that my personal odds of dying from it were reduced from the hundredths to the thousandths of a percent likelihood, but overall not much. Is there any medical downside to me taking it? Not much either. Pretty much a net zero. This isn't an "oh shit I got bit by a rabid dog thank God for this immediate rabies vaccine" situation.

Does it provide me with a societal benefit? Absolutely. Whether or not it provides me with a medical benefit, overcoming the collective farce is more important at this point on both an individual and societal level.
 
That’s quite an out you’ve carved for yourself to get the vaccine. Like hopping onto a titanic lifeboat after loudly claiming icebergs don’t sink ships, because you have to prove how silly this whole evacuation nonsense is!

Seems like if you really believed it was rushed, not supervised and poorly studied you wouldn’t let it anywhere near your arm.
 
Society without people like 2&2, Anus and Sailor:

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That’s quite an out you’ve carved for yourself to get the vaccine. Like hopping onto a titanic lifeboat after loudly claiming icebergs don’t sink ships, because you have to prove how silly this whole evacuation nonsense is!

Seems like if you really believed it was rushed, not supervised and poorly studied you wouldn’t let it anywhere near your arm.

So you believe it was unrushed, fully supervised, and meticulously studied?
 
Yeah.

But then again it doesn’t matter what I “believe”. As a non expert in this area I am comfortable and smart enough to recognize my knowledge gaps and to listen to those with expert knowledge. Not surprisingly it’s the usually morons insecure about their own lack of education that think being “smart” means pretending to know everything, finding conspiracies or “questioning authority” with no basis for doing so.

Oh also sad unhappy trolls do it too.
 
Once again, you believe it was a rushed, sloppy, unsupervised, unstudied, ineffective “placebo?” but yet you were among the first to get the shot! Willing to risk your life with that danger for...societal benefit.

I think you’re lying.
 
I will give you props though for going down with the ship with your original covid hottakes. Other more cowardly posters change their names to hide from their prior takes.
 
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