Agree on pharma. The economy has become, largely, a collection of monopolies taking rents. People don't think of patents and copyrights as monopolies even though they are, explicitly, legal monopolies.
On Pharma and others hiding behind "intellectual property ownership": where would we be if the earliest human/pre-human who figured out how to start a fire from "scratch" had said - "Hey, I've got to get to the patent office."
On McDonald's, they weren't always in such tight control. Back in the 70s I was a researcher working for a Securities Analyst who covered the Fast Food Industry. During the OPEC period our research found that unit pricing for food was jumping all over the place. McD insisted they had complete control over in-store pricing - both company stores and franchised. We decided to call every store in a particular city. First we had an interviewer call the store as a team mother who was put in charge planning a party for the team. She asked who ever answered the phone just to give her the prices of everything, so that when she ordered she knew ahead of time how much the bill would be. After we had all the stores' pricing information, we had another interviewer call each store and just find out whether it was company owned or franchised.
The result was that the prices were all over the place for both company and franchised. In short, all the stores - every single one - were competing against each other more than competing against other chains.
My boss had a conversation with a McD public information guy who was challenging him to reveal what city we had surveyed. My boss was about to tell him and I shot up out of my chair, waving my arms and mouthing "NO, NOO". My boss, a quick thinker, did a switcheroo on the McD guy and pretty soon he hung up.
"Why couldn't I tell him the city?"
"Because every three months McD sends a memo to their store managers no to talk to us. They've never been successful in shutting us down because we've never used any information that would identify a particular manager. But as soon as 1 manager gets fired or disciplined, that will shut our studies down. You were about to give them a whole city's worth of managers."
But the truth is McD couldn't control very much during the OPEC period. It was every man for himself.
As good as the mRNA vaccines! I personally know 2 people who have died from a brain aneurysm within 48 hours of receiving, plus a man who has had numbness in his legs ever since,
and a previously healthy 12 year old girl who suddenly has lymphoma all over her body. There
is a mountain of evidence that these vaccines are not acting as expected. That the adverse reporting systems are not functioning properly, and the mechanisms for monitoring the results of this experimental vaccine were never put in place.. as one would properly run an experiment of this magnitude. Yes, Don Midwest is right, "There is a treatment that is proven and inexpensive but does not bring profits and is being censored by Big Pharma and their captured health agencies." This treatment was looking promising and screaming for attention before the rollout
of these fantastic mRNA vaccines. To hear you suggest that the mRNA vaccine is merely being reserved for wealthy nations for profit, but not to serve the larger purpose of ending the pandemic seems ..off base. Though I do understand your line of thinking.
“Today, most informed policymakers believe that Biden didn’t really mean it when he put forward a TRIPS waiver. I don’t agree with that view;”
Matt, I think you’re a fool. Whether it’s about the trips waiver or the long term gain tax reform, Biden is taking idealistic people like you for a ride. Joe “my son did nothing wrong” Biden, is a cynical manipulator of the worst kind.
Just pasting this, from a Food in Jars community comment on FB, about both the ongoing shortage of canning lids, and the drop in sealing quality:
“It’s the same company….Newell…..that makes, Ball, Kerr, Bernardin and Golden Harvest mason jars. They are huge. Canning jars is a very small part of what they do but they own the market in North America. It’s only since the pandemic that I’ve seen this issue with the lids.”
I used to work for McDonald's as a teenager. Employees used to change restaurants all the time and it was still highly profitable. A free market allows workers to seek better opportunities without restriction, but as we all know corporations and capitalists oppose the free market.
Competition reduces profits.
The free market must have rules to keep it open and free and to keep out fraud and corruption.
mRNA is not the only vaccine. Protein based vaccines, like NVAX are easier to build, multi-valent (can carry multiple mutations), and compatible with influenza.
Releasing the mRNA IP rights is more of a non-sequitor, because of the manufacturing challenges. And constraint on supply of key inputs. mRNA is simply too new to scale. It is important in the long run, but not a scalable solution to attenuate COVID.
Vaccines like NVAX are in part delayed because of FDA approval processes. They could have used challenge studies, with smaller populations. But instead required everyone to have 40k population sized studies. Once the first drug gets approved, people are less likely to sign up for the other studies. So, new entrants have a harder and harder time entering the market. If you can not get FDA approval.
If you want a scale solution, review the Salk/Sabin vaccine Salk was notable, but US restricted distribution to USSR. Sabin had family connections to USSR so helped with their distribution. Sabin became the global dominant vaccine in short order.
There is a logical public policy for US govt to buy up and distribute vaccine to eliminate pandemics. HIV and HEP-C both could be (nearly) eliminated with wide distribution or PREP and the Hep-C vaccine. Rather than violate IP, and diminishing future innovation, it would serve US interest well to step in and make a global purchase. Not unlike what Bush did for HIV in Africa, but on a more global scale.
FDA and Big Pharma are in a corporatist spiral of regulatory capture. I am less excited about screwing with basic IP rights. It would be better to look at how the FDA is structured. Diminish regulatory capture. Put Pharma under more natural competition.
" Democracy is a better system than Chinese authoritarianism, but democracies are right now dominated by monopolists who overwhelm our sovereign capacity. "
Exactly, democracy isn't failing, unregulated corrupt crony capitalism is failing. The monopolists who control capitalism explicitly favor authoritarian governments who allow exploitation of their workforces, and so they are driving that failure forward at an accelerated pace. Monopolists and communists have much in common - they don't like democracy or free market competition.
The "west" produced the best vaccine first because of free market competition but also because of operation "Warp Speed" which was a democratic government intervention into the free market. That's the purpose of a democratic government - to intervene when necessary in the free market for the benefit of the people it represents. Authoritarian countries can't do that because communist governments are permanently corrupted by entrenched elites and because there is no free market competition.
The crony capitalists have convinced (and bribed) democratically elected politicians to sit down, shut up and deregulate, and that's had very negative consequences. The free market needs to be minimally regulated otherwise corruption and fraud will take over like it has now.
Re China's belief in the permanent decline of the West.
With its recent crack-down on public companies, China may have unwitting helped to rescue the West by showing the profound danger to capitalism that authoritarian communism truly represents. For years western investors were lulled into complacency by Deng Xiaoping's 1980's era embrace of capitalism as the only way to achieve improved standards of living for its population. With an estimated (Bloomberg) $1 trillion lost investors are shocked awake.
Health agencies do not have a prevention recommendation for Covid-19. There is a treatment that is proven and inexpensive but does not bring profits and is being censored by Big Pharma and their captured health agencies. I have to run but will give one place to start. Front Line Covid Critical Care associates flcc.net
As good as the mRNA vaccines, no. But how does Sputnik compare to J&J and AstraZeneca? At least in terms of double dosing the use of two different adenovirus capsids as the delivery vehicle seems more promising than the J&J or AZ approaches.
What is AstraZeneca's position in the Trips discussion? While it is not "new tech" (more like the Russian vaccines) it was deemed to be effective enough for mass use in the UK (majority getting AZ, rest getting PB) and is already being made globally
Good points about vaccines. But the article misses one essential point, and that is the role of the two types of vaccines. Getting vaccines quickly and safely to most developing countries means shipping and licensing the adenovirus vaccines of J&J and AZ. While they have mild drawbacks, these don't require the advanced storage technology that the mRNA vaccines do and can be given as a single shot.
What damaged them was the adverse publicity about a tiny number of cases of side effects, which may or may not been due to the vaccines. (COVID itself can produce the same symptoms.) Use of these vaccines has gone through unnecessary on-again-off-again agonizing. One of the doctors (Kulldorff) pointing out the obvious importance and utility of these vaccines was forced to resign from the CDC advisory committee because he made that point. (A week later, the CDC itself made the same point.)
It is this bungled public messaging, hair-on-fire panic, and obsession with marginal safety issues at the expense of the big picture that defines what is wrong with the US response on COVID. And it is the constant caving-in to hysteria and the noxious trolls and pseudo-skeptics of social media that the Chinese and Russian look and laugh at, even while simultaneously they stoke it and censor it from their own media.
The paralyzing effect of "safetyism" is one of the keys to understanding our age, as brilliantly explicated by Haidt and Lukianoff in their now-classic book.
"Democracy is a better system than Chinese authoritarianism,.."
Is it? Really?
These two questions just popped into my head reading this article (which frankly, like this entire blog) is a litany of how 'democracy' has been usurped/scammed and twisted into an corporate money machine.
I'm wondering just what is the purpose of a gov't if not to provide a sense of stability of the society that enables the general population to simply live their lives w/ a sense of hope that it will improve over time. Just looking at the massive construction of entire planned cities in China, w/ all the infrastructure being created and jobs...and then look at the rust belt in the USA...is 'democracy' working? I mean, the avg Chinese citizen's life is significantly better than it was 20 years ago. Can the same be said for America?
Agree on pharma. The economy has become, largely, a collection of monopolies taking rents. People don't think of patents and copyrights as monopolies even though they are, explicitly, legal monopolies.
It just comes down to fuck the rich, doesn't it? Narcissistic unpatriotic assholes they prove to be everyday.
On Pharma and others hiding behind "intellectual property ownership": where would we be if the earliest human/pre-human who figured out how to start a fire from "scratch" had said - "Hey, I've got to get to the patent office."
On McDonald's, they weren't always in such tight control. Back in the 70s I was a researcher working for a Securities Analyst who covered the Fast Food Industry. During the OPEC period our research found that unit pricing for food was jumping all over the place. McD insisted they had complete control over in-store pricing - both company stores and franchised. We decided to call every store in a particular city. First we had an interviewer call the store as a team mother who was put in charge planning a party for the team. She asked who ever answered the phone just to give her the prices of everything, so that when she ordered she knew ahead of time how much the bill would be. After we had all the stores' pricing information, we had another interviewer call each store and just find out whether it was company owned or franchised.
The result was that the prices were all over the place for both company and franchised. In short, all the stores - every single one - were competing against each other more than competing against other chains.
My boss had a conversation with a McD public information guy who was challenging him to reveal what city we had surveyed. My boss was about to tell him and I shot up out of my chair, waving my arms and mouthing "NO, NOO". My boss, a quick thinker, did a switcheroo on the McD guy and pretty soon he hung up.
"Why couldn't I tell him the city?"
"Because every three months McD sends a memo to their store managers no to talk to us. They've never been successful in shutting us down because we've never used any information that would identify a particular manager. But as soon as 1 manager gets fired or disciplined, that will shut our studies down. You were about to give them a whole city's worth of managers."
But the truth is McD couldn't control very much during the OPEC period. It was every man for himself.
As good as the mRNA vaccines! I personally know 2 people who have died from a brain aneurysm within 48 hours of receiving, plus a man who has had numbness in his legs ever since,
and a previously healthy 12 year old girl who suddenly has lymphoma all over her body. There
is a mountain of evidence that these vaccines are not acting as expected. That the adverse reporting systems are not functioning properly, and the mechanisms for monitoring the results of this experimental vaccine were never put in place.. as one would properly run an experiment of this magnitude. Yes, Don Midwest is right, "There is a treatment that is proven and inexpensive but does not bring profits and is being censored by Big Pharma and their captured health agencies." This treatment was looking promising and screaming for attention before the rollout
of these fantastic mRNA vaccines. To hear you suggest that the mRNA vaccine is merely being reserved for wealthy nations for profit, but not to serve the larger purpose of ending the pandemic seems ..off base. Though I do understand your line of thinking.
“Today, most informed policymakers believe that Biden didn’t really mean it when he put forward a TRIPS waiver. I don’t agree with that view;”
Matt, I think you’re a fool. Whether it’s about the trips waiver or the long term gain tax reform, Biden is taking idealistic people like you for a ride. Joe “my son did nothing wrong” Biden, is a cynical manipulator of the worst kind.
Thanks for your great work. Can McDonalds class action case be appealed and will it?
How can Merkel and Germany block Biden from sharing the Covid pattens & technology?
Just pasting this, from a Food in Jars community comment on FB, about both the ongoing shortage of canning lids, and the drop in sealing quality:
“It’s the same company….Newell…..that makes, Ball, Kerr, Bernardin and Golden Harvest mason jars. They are huge. Canning jars is a very small part of what they do but they own the market in North America. It’s only since the pandemic that I’ve seen this issue with the lids.”
I used to work for McDonald's as a teenager. Employees used to change restaurants all the time and it was still highly profitable. A free market allows workers to seek better opportunities without restriction, but as we all know corporations and capitalists oppose the free market.
Competition reduces profits.
The free market must have rules to keep it open and free and to keep out fraud and corruption.
mRNA is not the only vaccine. Protein based vaccines, like NVAX are easier to build, multi-valent (can carry multiple mutations), and compatible with influenza.
Releasing the mRNA IP rights is more of a non-sequitor, because of the manufacturing challenges. And constraint on supply of key inputs. mRNA is simply too new to scale. It is important in the long run, but not a scalable solution to attenuate COVID.
Vaccines like NVAX are in part delayed because of FDA approval processes. They could have used challenge studies, with smaller populations. But instead required everyone to have 40k population sized studies. Once the first drug gets approved, people are less likely to sign up for the other studies. So, new entrants have a harder and harder time entering the market. If you can not get FDA approval.
If you want a scale solution, review the Salk/Sabin vaccine Salk was notable, but US restricted distribution to USSR. Sabin had family connections to USSR so helped with their distribution. Sabin became the global dominant vaccine in short order.
There is a logical public policy for US govt to buy up and distribute vaccine to eliminate pandemics. HIV and HEP-C both could be (nearly) eliminated with wide distribution or PREP and the Hep-C vaccine. Rather than violate IP, and diminishing future innovation, it would serve US interest well to step in and make a global purchase. Not unlike what Bush did for HIV in Africa, but on a more global scale.
FDA and Big Pharma are in a corporatist spiral of regulatory capture. I am less excited about screwing with basic IP rights. It would be better to look at how the FDA is structured. Diminish regulatory capture. Put Pharma under more natural competition.
Astral Codex has a good post around FDA. It would be interesting for you and him to coverage discussion around regulatory capture and monopoly power in the pharma FDA nexus https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/adumbrations-of-aducanumab
" Democracy is a better system than Chinese authoritarianism, but democracies are right now dominated by monopolists who overwhelm our sovereign capacity. "
Exactly, democracy isn't failing, unregulated corrupt crony capitalism is failing. The monopolists who control capitalism explicitly favor authoritarian governments who allow exploitation of their workforces, and so they are driving that failure forward at an accelerated pace. Monopolists and communists have much in common - they don't like democracy or free market competition.
The "west" produced the best vaccine first because of free market competition but also because of operation "Warp Speed" which was a democratic government intervention into the free market. That's the purpose of a democratic government - to intervene when necessary in the free market for the benefit of the people it represents. Authoritarian countries can't do that because communist governments are permanently corrupted by entrenched elites and because there is no free market competition.
The crony capitalists have convinced (and bribed) democratically elected politicians to sit down, shut up and deregulate, and that's had very negative consequences. The free market needs to be minimally regulated otherwise corruption and fraud will take over like it has now.
Re China's belief in the permanent decline of the West.
With its recent crack-down on public companies, China may have unwitting helped to rescue the West by showing the profound danger to capitalism that authoritarian communism truly represents. For years western investors were lulled into complacency by Deng Xiaoping's 1980's era embrace of capitalism as the only way to achieve improved standards of living for its population. With an estimated (Bloomberg) $1 trillion lost investors are shocked awake.
Health agencies do not have a prevention recommendation for Covid-19. There is a treatment that is proven and inexpensive but does not bring profits and is being censored by Big Pharma and their captured health agencies. I have to run but will give one place to start. Front Line Covid Critical Care associates flcc.net
"The vaccines aren’t as good as ours"
As good as the mRNA vaccines, no. But how does Sputnik compare to J&J and AstraZeneca? At least in terms of double dosing the use of two different adenovirus capsids as the delivery vehicle seems more promising than the J&J or AZ approaches.
What is AstraZeneca's position in the Trips discussion? While it is not "new tech" (more like the Russian vaccines) it was deemed to be effective enough for mass use in the UK (majority getting AZ, rest getting PB) and is already being made globally
Good points about vaccines. But the article misses one essential point, and that is the role of the two types of vaccines. Getting vaccines quickly and safely to most developing countries means shipping and licensing the adenovirus vaccines of J&J and AZ. While they have mild drawbacks, these don't require the advanced storage technology that the mRNA vaccines do and can be given as a single shot.
What damaged them was the adverse publicity about a tiny number of cases of side effects, which may or may not been due to the vaccines. (COVID itself can produce the same symptoms.) Use of these vaccines has gone through unnecessary on-again-off-again agonizing. One of the doctors (Kulldorff) pointing out the obvious importance and utility of these vaccines was forced to resign from the CDC advisory committee because he made that point. (A week later, the CDC itself made the same point.)
It is this bungled public messaging, hair-on-fire panic, and obsession with marginal safety issues at the expense of the big picture that defines what is wrong with the US response on COVID. And it is the constant caving-in to hysteria and the noxious trolls and pseudo-skeptics of social media that the Chinese and Russian look and laugh at, even while simultaneously they stoke it and censor it from their own media.
The paralyzing effect of "safetyism" is one of the keys to understanding our age, as brilliantly explicated by Haidt and Lukianoff in their now-classic book.
"Democracy is a better system than Chinese authoritarianism,.."
Is it? Really?
These two questions just popped into my head reading this article (which frankly, like this entire blog) is a litany of how 'democracy' has been usurped/scammed and twisted into an corporate money machine.
I'm wondering just what is the purpose of a gov't if not to provide a sense of stability of the society that enables the general population to simply live their lives w/ a sense of hope that it will improve over time. Just looking at the massive construction of entire planned cities in China, w/ all the infrastructure being created and jobs...and then look at the rust belt in the USA...is 'democracy' working? I mean, the avg Chinese citizen's life is significantly better than it was 20 years ago. Can the same be said for America?