Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: health care Page 10 of 35

Offshoring Critical Industries Is So Harmful It Should Be Treason (Covid Edition)

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On March 25, 2021

44 Comments

I was impressed how fast the UK and the US were vaccinating their population. How were they doing it, after they had been so incompetent during the rest of the pandemic?

Simple enough. Restrictions on vaccine exports.

Meanwhile:

India delays big exports of AstraZeneca shot, including to COVAX, as infections surge

And then there’s this:

(Spare me the self-serving arguments that breaking the patents wouldn’t have helped because it takes too much time to ramp up production. However long it takes, the sooner  your open up the IP, the faster it happens.)

And we could make it happen faster:

But the global capacity for producing vaccines is about a third of what is needed, says Ellen t’Hoen, an expert in medicines policy and intellectual property law.

….

To make a vaccine you not only need to have the right to produce the actual substance they are composed of (which is protected by patents), you also need to have the knowledge about how to make them because the technology can be complex.

The WHO does not have the authority to sidestep patents – but it is trying to bring countries together to find a way to bolster vaccine supplies.

The discussions include using provisions in international law to get around patents and helping countries to have the technical ability to make them.

Rich countries use IP law to keep poor countries poor, and to kill and impoverish their citizens to make even larger profits.

And, of course, if you’re stupid enough to believe neoliberal bullshit about how your countries will be OK and don’t take steps even though you have manufacturing capacity, (Europe), well, your citizens die. The EU is now restricting imports to the UK. I wonder how many Europeans will die because of not having those 10 million doses?

“I mention specifically the U.K.,” said EU Commission Vice-President Valdis Dombrovskis. Since the end of January, “some 10 million doses have been exported from the EU to the U.K. and zero doses have been exported from U.K. to the EU.”

OK. I have said this for years and years but I’m going to say it again now that it is being illustrated brutally: if you can’t make it yourself, you can’t be sure you’ll have it when you need it, since countries that can make it will tend to prioritize themselves.

You must make and grow everything essential to your country domestically if you can. Any international laws that forbid you from doing so are illegitimate. They may exist; they are not Just. This doesn’t mean completely breaking patent law (though it needs to be much less draconian and a lot less long), it does mean, at the least, writing in mandatory licensing provisions at reasonable prices.

A lot of people are going to die who didn’t need to because neoliberal “free trade” orthodoxy said you didn’t need to be able to both design and make vaccines in your own country: the “market” would supply you.

Eventually.

This isn’t just about behaviour now. It is about behaviour that has been encoded into law and trade practice over decades.

Don’t offshore anything that matters. If your citizens have to pay 5% or 10% more, slap on tariffs.

To not do so, if you think the welfare of your citizens is your duty, is treason.

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The Simplest Explanation For Not Breaking Covid Vaccine Patents

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On February 15, 2021

58 Comments

The faster we get everyone immunized, throughout the world, the more likely we can stop Covid from going chronic, becoming the new flu (but more deadly, unless/until it mutates to become less fatal, which the untried models say it should.)

However, if Covid is cured, well, you can’t make money off Covid any more, can you?

Chronic Covid, mutating constantly, means more and more vaccines, and more and more and more money for vaccine makers.

Ghastly, and I know that many readers are probably, “that’s absurd”, but consider, does it have both explanatory and predictive power?

Does, “Covid makes the rich, richer so they want it to keep going” have explanatory and predictive power?

Qui Bono? Who benefits? Since the people who run our societies profit from Covid, why would they actually want it over (remember, billionaires have become vastly richer.)

I, too, dislike living in a society where this explanation has stronger predictive power than “our leaders don’t want us to die in large numbers, and become poverty-struck, just so they can get richer,” but that statement, well, look at it closely. If that was true, how would our rulers behave? Not just during Covid, but at other times?

Yeah.

I mean, I’ve been saying this sort of thing for a while, because it’s obviously true, but I’m embarrassed it took me so long to realize it applied to vaccine creators as well, especially since Pharma has a well-known bias towards medicines that are palliatives, not cures. Someone who needs your medicine again and again is much better than someone who needs it only once.

Gotta admire the pure predator instinct in our rulers. They’re the wolves, we’re the sheep and God, do they love mutton.

It’s them or us, and so far, it’s us.

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Explosive Growth, Vaccines And Covid Variants

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On February 10, 2021

66 Comments

Stumbled across this chart of projected Covid growth in the province of Alberta. This is a chart of what happens IF Alberta changes nothing in terms of its restrictions and vaccine count, ALL that changes is the B117 variant becomes dominant.

If that doesn’t concern you, we aren’t looking at the same chart.

The good news is that it appears that vaccines do reduce transmission and Pfizer, at least, work against B117. What that means is that in order to crush Covid we are either going to have to get almost everyone vaccinated or we are going to have to do a proper “Zero Covid” lockdown. There are other variants, as well, and the data against the South African variant is not as good, so it may be that vaccines may not do the job at all: they may deal with original Covid and B117 but mutations continue.

If that’s the case we will only get this under control with severe lockdowns and travel restrictions of the sort that most countries outside of Asia have been unwilling to do, plus wide-spread vaccination. mRNA vaccines have fast design times, and if we are willing to risk them without trials, and we are willing to force sharing of the design and production knowledge, we might use fast-turnaround vaccines to help against Covid.

The risk here is that Covid becomes endemic, a new normal, like the flu, never truly under control, but much more dangerous. This also may lead to a world where travel never recovers properly, especially between nations which have taken the disease seriously and dealt with it, and those which have not, like America, most of Europe and Canada.

To avoid this we need to stop dancing around. Break the vaccine patents and force sharing. Recompense the companies involved, a few tens of billions is all that is needed and is trivial to major governments. Go to CovidZero. And get vaccines into every arm.

One piece of good news is that the Russian vaccine, Sputnik V, a traditional vaccine, is 92% effective: only 3% less than then two mRNA vaccines. It doesn’t need very cold refridgeration and it doesn’t have the unknowns of a new tech. I would suggest, at least for the moment, to push it heavily for populations who are vaccine hesitant: it’s still a vaccine, but not an untried type.

The other point that should be made is that we need to defeat this in every country to be truly safe, and that means vaccines and support for poorer countries. Supply bottlenecks because a few companies and countries want to maintain IP laws are insane; they could leave us with a permanent disease problem which will hurt the economy for decades to come. This is yet another example of how we are unable to plan more than for a few weeks to a year or so in advance, no matter how important the issue.

For my readers, I reiterate that:

Be careful out there. Don’t be stupid, take what precautions you can, and be as safe as you can. I know for many of my readers, who work jobs that just aren’t safe, there are limits, but Covid isn’t over and I’d like for you to not get sick, get long Covid, or die.

This isn’t over yet.

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Will Bill Gates And mRNA Vaccine Monopolies Be Responsible For Millions of Covid Deaths?

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On January 26, 2021

26 Comments

Good question.

Oxford University surprised and pleased advocates of overhauling the vaccine business in April by promising to donate the rights to its promising coronavirus vaccine to any drugmaker…

…A few weeks later, Oxford—urged on by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—reversed course. It signed an exclusive vaccine deal with AstraZeneca that gave the pharmaceutical giant sole rights and no guarantee of low prices

Seems pretty straight forward.

Then there’s a second issue. The mRNA vaccines, which so far seem to be the most effective, are supply capped: they can’t manufacture them fast enough. Unrelated to Gates (so far as I know) the manufacturers of those vaccines, like Moderna, are refusing to share the manufacturing process and other information. Vastly more doses could be produced and many lives saved, but IP is sacred, not your grandmother’s life.

Moderna’s entire costs for the vaccine were covered by government, yet the manufacturing process is kept secret, and people die.

It would be simple enough to just pay Moderna and Pfizer their expected profits plus some, and break the patents: this is something governments can do. It was suggested and vetoed.

So, if someone you know dies because of no vaccine, remember that government and Bill Gates wanted that, because the holy grail of restricting information so that the rich could profit off it was more important than people living or dying.

This is always who Gates has been, by the way. He’s white-washed his reputation over the last few decades, but he’s always been a monopolist who is willing to have other suffer and his foundation is mostly about his own interests. The Gates Foundation interference in education was a vast disaster, as well.

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Staying Happy in Self-Isolation

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On January 18, 2021

27 Comments

A reader wrote me to say this article had been helpful to them. Given that the pandemic and self-isolation is ongoing, I thought it would be worth putting back up. (Originally published March 2, 2020.)

There are a lot of guides for this going around, so I’m going to skip most–but not all–of the more obvious advice. You know how to watch shows online, play games, and read books. Catch up on all that reading!

Problems fall into three broad categories: lack of people, other people, and emotional self-regulation. I’ll speak briefly on the first two, but this article is mostly about learning to create your own emotions on demand.

The first issue is if you’re by yourself. People, even most introverts, do need human contact. Isolation is harmful, and long periods of it show as brain damage. The internet isn’t much of a substitute, but as much as it is, make an effort: Don’t stick to text. Get on voice or even video and voice. The more channels you have, the better. I’ve had people I haven’t talked to in ages reaching out to me, this is a good time to reconnect to old friends and relatives you like. Even better if you can do something online together–games or puzzles or whatever. Set up a camera to show the kitchen and talk while you cook, etc.

The second issue is you’re with other people: People are great, but people also suck, and even if you like someone being in the same place as them for two or three weeks when you’re used to seeing them only the evening and the morning can get on your nerves. At the extreme end, I’ve seen anecdotal reports from police that domestic violence calls are increasing.

This is easiest to handle if you’re honest with each other than you need some alone time. Have the conversation, be clear it doesn’t mean you don’t like or love the other person, and consider even scheduling both alone and together time. Some people won’t need this, we all know best friends and couples who love being in each other’s pockets, but if that isn’t you, it doesn’t mean you aren’t real friends or don’t love each other.

The third issue is emotional self-regulation. Most of us have routines, things we do every day. Get up, coffee, light breakfast, drive to work, work, chat with co-worker, have lunch, work a bit more, goof of on the internet, etc, etc. We’ve figured out routines that keep us mostly in the same set of emotional spaces throughout the day. This is like walking with a cane: You’ve set up mood assists throughout the day, week, and year.

When you lose that routine, you lose those assists. You’ve been walking with a cane: Leaning on it, threatening kids on your lawn, and suddenly a dog thinks its a stick and races away and it’s gone.

So you need to learn how emotionally self-regulate without so many assists or you need to find new assists.

Write down things you love doing during the day that you can do at home. Those are your assists. When  your mood is low, look at the list and do one of them.

To emotionally regulate without assists you have to accept that a lot of your moods can be directly controlled. I’m not saying it’s always easy, but it’s mostly not easy because you never learned how; it’s not something our society trains us to do.

Let’s say you want to feel loving. Stand up, close your eyes, and imagine a child you love or a puppy. They’re mad glad to see you, and dash to you, and throw themselves into your arms. Open your arms in a huge hug, then mimic hugging them. Imagine it as best you can.

Practice this both with the physical movements, and entirely in your mind, until you can do it whenever you want and bring up that feeling.

Say you want to feel excited or gleeful. This is an arousal emotion, and can be used to change fear into something positive. Open your eyes as wide as you can, concentrating on lifting them up, and grin! Think of something exciting: Jumping out of an airplane with a parachute, jumping over a wall, playing frisbee with your dog, that time you snuck into some place you shouldn’t have and it was a gas, the first time you learned about something you loved (I remember how excited I was when I first read D&D books in the seventh grade), or remember bombing down a hill on your bike or a toboggan.

The feeling you’re looking for is WHEEEEEE!

When I do this, I often remember the TV show Pinky and the Brain. It always starts with Pinky asking, “What are we going to do today, Brain?” To which Brain replies, “Same as every day! Take over the WORLD.” I say that out loud or mentally.

Any emotion you can normally feel can be activated in this way: Imagine the situation, and either mimic the physical sensations of it happening, or feel them in your imagination. Ideally do both.

So find a memory or experience that reliably brings up the emotions, and watch your body as it moves into that emotion. What does it feel like? What is the face doing? The body? What are you thinking?

Once you know what it feels like, and what the change feels like, you can learn to bring it under conscious control.

There’s nothing wrong with using props here, especially in the beginning. If a piece of music reliably brings up the mood, use it. Just be aware as the emotion arises, then try and do it without the prop later.

Like most skills, there’ll be fumbling. New skills take time. Keep at it. You’ve got plenty of time and this is a chance to learn a skill that will make your life immeasurably better long after social distancing is done.

(If readers like this article, I may put together a post on emotional self-regulation while dealing with other people. Other people can be the greatest help or hindrance, but working together in this way is the among the greatest experiences in life.)

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Effects of the New 60 Percent More Infectious Covid Strain

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On December 28, 2020

33 Comments

Cases have been found outside of Britain, including in the US and, ironically, France (slammed the door too late.) The practical result of the increased infectiousness are discussed by Tomas Pueyo.

The points are, as you’d expect, that it increases the speed of exponential growth. If it becomes the dominant strain (and it almost certainly will, because it grows faster), you have to really lock down. No sham lockdowns, people don’t go out for anything but food (maybe you even deliver that); schools are closed, no one works outside the house unless they truly are an essential worker.

Herd immunity now requires 75 percent+, not 60 percent of the population. That means it will take longer, and with respect to vaccines, people will need to be convinced to take them, or if necessary, forced to.

Countries that already got Covid-19 under control, like Vietnam, New Zealand, China, and Taiwan (notice a trend?) will be fine. They just keep tracking and tracing; keep quarantining visitors, and keep clamping down hard on even a hint of a break-out. Those of us who haven’t, like most of Europe, the US, Canada, Brazil, and so on, can either get serious RIGHT now and close schools and go to a real lock down, or we are going to have to wait for vaccine immunity, which may take until the end of 2022 depending on how many doses your country is getting and when (and if people will take them, or be forced to).

In general terms, my sense is that the first half of 2022 is going to be worse than 2021 in countries that have fumbled Covid, after that things should start improving noticeably.

This was a pro-active choice by our elites: They decided not to handle Covid. It was handled in many countries, the playbook is known to anyone who cares to know it just by seeing what was done or reading a 101 textbook, but “fumbling” Covid made elites in countries like the UK, Canada, and the US a lot richer and more powerful, so it was allowed to rage through the population and destroy the small business economy so that those who were able to stay open, like Amazon and Apple, and so on could grab huge amounts of market share.

Grandma died and young people got life-long heart problems so Jeff Bezos and private equity scum could get richer.

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Trump Outflanks Dems from the Left

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On December 23, 2020

53 Comments

So, as you’ve probably heard by now, Trump is opposing the Covid “stimulus” bill and asking it be amended to include a $2,000 check, not a $600 one. Pelosi says he should pass the bill then they’ll pass another bill with the extra $1,400 (which is a ludicrous lie and we all know that).

The cries from many liberal supporters of the bill are that it is a good bill because it includes unemployment insurance relief increases of $300 a week. That’s sort of true, it’s the main good thing in the bill, but the problem is that a lot of people who need help aren’t currently getting UI.

Trump’s simply right about this, whatever his motives. Moreover, throughout the year he’s fairly consistently advocated more relief than Congress has provided.

But the standard play is unfolding. Screamed warnings that if the bill doesn’t pass no one will get relief, and that if it isn’t passed by the 26th, 12 million people will go off UI, so pass the bill, even if it’s inadequate. “We’re giving you something, in a bill packed with pork, and that’s not nothing, so take something.”

This is based on standard economic-neoliberal thinking. There’s a little decision game about it. You and another person are given a hundred dollars. The other person decides how the money is split. You can’t change how it is split, but you can veto getting any money.

The theory is that even if the person deciding how the money is split offers you a cent, you should take it. After all, you’re better off, right? In the real world, people don’t do that. If the split gets too low, they veto any money.

This is correct if you are dealing with a situation where the “game” will be played more often than once. If you don’t do it, you get a cent each time, and the other person gets almost all the money.

The correct action is a veto.

It’s why the Squad should have taken down Pelosi if she didn’t meet some essential demands — to show that they can’t be bullied, and that they have to be dealt with. If you wont use whatever power you have, you have no power, and you get nothing but table scraps.

In this sense, Trump is able to be “wrong” because he’s lame duck now. If he was going to be around for another four years, this threat would have real power because he could gum a lot of things up and he could insist those 12 million people be put back on UI (it’s not like an amended bill couldn’t do that). Biden is very unlikely to veto such a bill.

But he’s not wrong that $600 checks are too little and an insult. That’s not even a month’s rent for most people.

And if he runs in 2024, a lot of people will remember this attempt to get them more money as his last fight.

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A Brief Note on the New Covid “Stimulus” Bill

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On December 21, 2020

66 Comments

So, the bill that looks likely to pass is 900 billion. One $600 check, $300/week in UI improvement (this is the real good thing in the bill) and some miscellaneous good stuff, along with a variety of pork.

It’s a bad bill, totally inadequate to the circumstances. In the new year, millions of Americans will become homeless. It’s hard to say exactly how many, but ten million would be a low end estimate.

There is insufficient support for States and cities, so there will be a round of savage austerity cuts in the new year, given the complete refusal to actually tax rich people.

In many ways, 2021 is going to be WORSE than 2020 for Americans. About a third of small businesses will likely go out of business, the big winners like Amazon will not hire enough people to make up for it, and the end result will be a shittier economy than in 2019 concentrated in fewer hands.

Meanwhile, in London, England, a new Covid strain has appeared that is twice as contagious as the original.

None of this was remotely necessary. Proper support for small business and people would have cost less than the financial crisis bailouts (and could mostly have been done through the Fed for “free”), while the pandemic itself could easily have been crushed in about six months by simply following the same playbook that places like Vietnam used, a playbook that is simply “follow the textbook.”

But, in the US, the UK, and Canada, and I suspect a lot of other nations, Covid-19 has been a huge boon to the rich, vastly increasing their wealth and power. So, well, why save lives and jobs? I know I’ve said this repeatedly, but it’s a point that bears repeating.

You’re getting scraps, while the rich feast, and the politicians tweet selfies of themselves getting vaccinated before ICU nurses and doctors.

It’s how this part of the world runs. But not how it has to.

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