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You are here: Home / Healthcare / COVID-19 Coronavirus / For the Insatiably Curious: Quick Notes from Yesterday’s COVID Summit

For the Insatiably Curious: Quick Notes from Yesterday’s COVID Summit

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(Dr. Teicher is Director of Programs for Doctors Without Borders / MSF)

Reader Interactions

73Comments

  1. 1.

    Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony

    For once, it would be nice if the criticism wasn’t “The US isn’t doing enough” and was more, “Why isn’t everyone else doing as much?”

  2. 2.

    germy

    BREAKING: Lead Florida GOP Senator, Manny Diaz calls for a review of all vaccine mandates, including polio, mumps, and rubella.

    Just when you thought the state of affairs in Florida could not get any worse.

    — Aaron Parnas (@AaronParnas) September 23, 2021

  4. 4.

    Old School

    Biden is doing it wrong! The Trump administration just wouldn’t have donated anything, so people couldn’t have complained about the 1.1 billion doses being too small.

  5. 5.

    lowtechcyclist

    Only Democrats the USA has agency, I guess.

    My attitude is more: as an American citizen and voter, I have agency where the USA is concerned, but I have little if any with respect to other countries.

    I can call up my Congresscritters and lean on them to do more, but I can’t do the same with France or Germany or any other country.

  7. 7.

    Betty

    From what I have read, waiving the patent protection would be much more helpful than just donating vaccine. It has been opposed by the EU as well, as expected, by the patent holders. Not sure how Biden can change that.

  8. 8.

    trollhattan

    “Some say.”

    Some say I have a mean curveball.
    Some say the weather isn’t too hot, it’s not hot enough.
    Some say disco music was good.
    Some say pickup trucks are too small.
    Some say climate change is god’s will.
    People are saying “Sir, you’re still president sir.”
    rinse&repeat

  10. 10.

    trollhattan

    @Betty: My feeble understanding of mRNA vaccine manufacture is that it is not easily mastered and not necessarily portable to facilities with less than state-of-the-art equipment and talent. But it’s also not the only effective type of Covid vaccine in circulation, so perhaps other technologies can be replicated in a timely fashion.

    I also wonder if they have managed to make the Pfizer vaccine less demanding of hyper-cold transportation and storage? It seems like the least-likely to be distributed to the under-vaccinated parts of the globe under the original limitations.

  11. 11.

    Baud

    I think the difficulty we have with criticism is that are all living with the experience of seeing people get so caught up in their criticisms that they lose sight of the greater struggle, and that has cost us dearly.

    Also, too, oftentimes, the criticism is bullshit.

  13. 13.

    Roger Moore

    @lowtechcyclist:

    My attitude is more: as an American citizen and voter, I have agency where the USA is concerned, but I have little if any with respect to other countries.

    That makes sense for you personally, but what is Doctors Without Borders’ excuse?  It seems to me that it’s the typical activist problem: activists wind up being harder on their allies than their opponents because they think they’ll have some influence on allies and have already written off their opponents.  I understand the reasoning, but it comes off as punishing the people who agree with you while letting the people who disagree off the hook.  IMO, the right tactic is to praise your allies first, chastise your opponents, and then finish off with your wish list of further actions.

  14. 14.

    Matt McIrvin

    @trollhattan: The storage requirements for the mRNA vaccines have steadily gotten less onerous, not because the vaccines changed, but because more testing was done of what they could actually stand. The initial recommendations were overkill.

  15. 15.

    Old Man Shadow

    Doesn’t Biden know there’s a microchip shortage going on? How the Hell are we supposed to find ANOTHER 500 million chips to stick in those vaccines?

  16. 16.

    Captain C

    @germy: At what point does it become feasible to believe that this shit is intentionally being spread by (a) bad actor(s) specifically to cause a sizeable portion of the U.S. population to destroy itself, and anyone around them, too.

  17. 17.

    Bruce K in ATH-GR

    @wenchacha:

    They are against that “cancel culture,” remember? All Viruses Matter

    To be more precise, they’re against cancel culture when it’s them or their friends being “cancelled”. They’re all for it when they’re the ones doing the cancelling. (See the band formerly known as the Dixie Chicks.)

  18. 18.

    Captain C

    Complainer: The U.S. isn’t doing enough!  They need to do X!!

    Biden/White House:  OK, we’re doing X plus more, in fact.

    Complainer:  That’s not enough!

  19. 19.

    Roger Moore

    @Betty: ​
     
    As I understand it, the biggest holdup is not the patents but a lot of the low level manufacturing know-how. People focus on the patents because waiving the patent protections or having some kind of compulsory licensing scheme for them are things the government can do. But the nitty gritty of exactly how to get the manufacturing working is something that’s completely under the control of manufacturers. It isn’t necessarily something that can be easily transferred, and it certainly isn’t something the government can easily compel the manufacturers to transfer.

  22. 22.

    gene108

    Dr. Treicher may have good intentions, but all she’s doing for Biden, in the USA, is echoing the “Biden failed at ______” theme that’s been prominent since August, whether it’s withdrawing from Afghanistan, keeping Americans safe from COVID, or getting his agenda enacted.

    I see liberals on Twitter deciding the reason Manchin and Sinema are not eliminating the filibuster is because of corporate donations, Koch money, etc. They are writing Republican attack ads for Republicans.

    Maybe I’m overthinking things, and these negative messages to prospective allies don’t matter.

  23. 23.

    trollhattan

    @Captain C:

    Also,

    “I wanted Y but you did X instead!”

    “You asked for X.”

    “No I didn’t!”

    “Here’s your letter, asking for X.”

    “Well, I meant Y and what’s more, you know it. I would never ask for X!”

  24. 24.

    Baud

    @Roger Moore:

    it’s the typical activist problem: activists wind up being harder on their allies than their opponents because they think they’ll have some influence on allies and have already written off their opponents.  I understand the reasoning, but it comes off as punishing the people who agree with you while letting the people who disagree off the hook

     

     

     

    With respect to some domestic critics, the main problem I have with this approach is the same problem I have with the Overton Window theory.

    If you are applying these theories consistently, then you should be balls to the wall in trying to get as many Dems elected as possible, to increase the number of people in office over whom you have influence, and you should be adamantly opposed to anyone who pretends both sides are the same. But too often in the past, I have not seen that level of intensity at election time.

  25. 25.

    Hoodie

    @Roger Moore:  It may also involve non patent protected trade secrets that, once divulged, cannot be protected using IP laws. Companies often do not patent protect manufacturing processes that are done in-house and not likely to be reverse engineered or otherwise disclosed. Some of these things may not be particularly patentable but may still be valuable.

  27. 27.

    Roger Moore

    @gene108:

    I see liberals on Twitter deciding the reason Manchin and Sinema are not eliminating the filibuster is because of corporate donations, Koch money, etc. They are writing Republican attack ads for Republicans.

    I think you have that wrong.  They aren’t the ones originating those criticisms; they’re parroting stuff that’s being fed to them by the kind of activist left who think the Democrats are the problem.  Liberals need to do a way better job of recognizing that lefties are not reliable allies.

  28. 28.

    gene108

    @Roger Moore:

    I think the reality is vaccine manufacturing capacity will not go to nations that don’t already have the capacity. I think countries like Israel and India that have strong pharmaceutical manufacturing capacity will be the ones expanding production, if intellectual property rights are waived.

  29. 29.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Captain C: I mean, that’s known–the Russian troll farms are seriously into this stuff. Sometimes they spread both pro-vax and anti-vax memes just to make people fight.

  30. 30.

    Another Scott

    @Betty: Nature – from May:

    First step of three

    “It’s a one-two-three,” explains Rachel Cohen, US director for the non-profit Drugs and Neglected Diseases initiative in New York City. “First we need to remove patent obstacles, second we need to transfer the knowledge on how to make them, and step three is a massive investment in manufacturing capacity.”

    And at the moment, step one is far from complete. The World Trade Organization will not negotiate the details of which patents to adjust until all its member countries agree on some sort of waiver. Health-policy analysts speculate that other countries will follow in the footsteps of the United States, although the European Union might hold out beyond the end of the meeting. South Africa and India have proposed patent waivers not only on vaccines, but also on COVID-19-related medical devices, drugs and diagnostic technologies; so far, Tai’s statement mentions only vaccines.

    Drugmakers and others who oppose the measure say that waivers sabotage companies’ enormous investments in drug and vaccine development, which are compensated by their ability to set the price on products that they exclusively own. Normally, patents reward pharmaceutical companies by protecting their inventions from competition by generics for a limited time — US patents on drugs typically last for 20 years.

    Pharmaceutical-industry backlash

    Drug companies aren’t the only opponents of the measure. In a 25 April interview with Sky News, global health philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates argued against intellectual-property waivers, saying that manufacturers of generics couldn’t ramp up production quickly, and that vaccine quality could be compromised. After the US government’s waiver announcement, the industry group Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America released a statement echoing these points, saying: “The Biden Administration has taken an unprecedented step that will undermine our global response to the pandemic and compromise safety.”

    Proponents of the waiver disagree, pointing out that generics manufacturers have been supplying the world with high-quality vaccines and medicines for years. They point out that taxpayers helped to foot the bill for the development of several COVID-19 vaccines, and say that the claim that pharmaceutical companies must recoup all the costs is therefore unfair — especially during a crisis. Several other obstacles must be addressed, however, such as making sure distribution is equitable.

    Since Bill Gates is usually wrong when it comes to public policy (and even when it comes to software), and PhRMA always fights anything to reduce drug costs, my gut tells me that Biden is right.

    More at the link.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  31. 31.

    WaterGirl

    @Old School: I am reminded of the scene in Tootsie when Dustin Hoffman is auditioning as himself.

    Them: We’re looking for somebody taller…
    Dustin:  I can be taller!

    Them: We’re looking for somebody shorter…
    Dustin:  I can be shorter!

    Them: We’re looking for somebody different..
    Dustin: I can be different!

    Them: We’re looking for somebody else.

    Biden’s number FOR ANYTHING is either too high, or too low.

    Biden’s action ON ANYTHING is too much, too little, too soon, or too late.

    They are looking for somebody else.  Someone besides Biden.  By definition, whatever he does is not right.

    The silver lining is that when you are damned if you do, and damned if you don’t, you have the luxury of doing what you believe is right.

  32. 32.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Baud: The other half is that the US really does have tremendous outsize agency because it is very big, rich and powerful, and any perceived decline in hyperpower status has not changed that.

  33. 33.

    Roger Moore

    @Hoodie: ​
     
    We’re on the same page. What you’re talking about is more or less what I had in mind when talking about the manufacturing details. Part of the reason it isn’t really patentable is because it’s very low level stuff that actually varies from site to site and even machine to machine. You have to tune a manufacturing process to get it really right, and the details of how to do that tuning are some of the manufacturers’ crown jewels.
    It’s also just really hard. Pfizer and Moderna have spent years tweaking their processes to get them production ready. Even if they were willing to share their knowledge, they wouldn’t necessarily be able to do it on the timescale people are expecting. People bitch and moan about big pharma, but this kind of thing is where they earn their money. Taking a promising therapy and turning it into a mass produced reality is at least as difficult as developing that promising therapy was, and it’s certainly a lot more expensive. At the cutting edge, it’s really only the handful of big pharma companies that can pull it off, which is why they’re big pharma and everyone else isn’t.

  34. 34.

    Matt McIrvin

    …of course, one can take notions of agency to bizarre extremes.

    The ethical argument Osama bin Laden made in his videos was memorable: he argued that killing American civilians was not just permissible but obligatory, because the US had done a lot of harm, killed countless people and was also a democracy, so the American populace was not distinguishable from its government and in fact the American people were the guilty parties he needed to punish directly.

    To hear this after the Supreme Court had installed Bush in office with a minority vote was particularly frustrating. But of course Osama brought up everything from slavery to Hiroshima, going back a long way, and would presumably argue that all of this was highly bipartisan. Of course, the upshot would be that if this argument were taken seriously, everyone would want to give up political power and have a nice dictatorship just to keep their hands clean. Hey, wasn’t me…

  36. 36.

    zhena gogolia

    @Matt McIrvin: I think that psychology has been in work in Russia for a while, unfortunately.
    I mean:

    everyone would want to give up political power and have a nice dictatorship just to keep their hands clean.

  39. 39.

    Hoodie

    @Roger Moore: It doesn’t have to be particularly low level, however.  It may be patentable but not worth patenting because it’s too easy to work around patent claims to it or it’s too hard to detect patent infringement by another party (e.g., you can’t access their manufacturing line).

  40. 40.

    prostratedragon

    @Roger Moore:  I’ve been wishing to see more of this tactic for a while now. Unrelenting militancy is not always the best policy, and stomping on moves that don’t immediately achieve what no one has ever done does not win people over.

  41. 41.

    topclimber

    @Roger Moore: I didn’t find the Doctors Without Borders comment to be harsh on the US at all. Au the hell contraire, mon ami.

    The headline says the steps taken will not end the pandemic. Not that they fall short in any moral way. Then the article says the way out is not more donations but more dispered vaccine production.

    “The only way to end this pandemic anywhere is to end it everywhere.” That’s the point I take out of Dr. Teicher’s article.

    Let’s not fall so easily into defensiveness or just lump all criticisms into the same class–some are measured and constructive, others far from it.

  44. 44.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Roger Moore:

    It seems to me that it’s the typical activist problem: activists wind up being harder on their allies than their opponents

    Is that too long for a rotating tag?

  46. 46.

    topclimber

    @gene108: Did you read what she said?

    The bigger question is, given that corporate media is going to be unfair to Biden and the Dems, why are we worrying that any constructive criticism is helping the GQP? They have plenty of folks advancing their BS, and will push it whatever we do.

    The key thing to do is end the pandemic, worldwide, to whatever extent that is possible. The rest is Politico horse-race crapola.

  48. 48.

    lowtechcyclist

    For every one shot we’ve put in an American arm, we’ve donated three shots globally.

    Language like this from the White House bothers me.  They may have committed the money for those shots, but most of the shots themselves don’t even exist yet.  Speaking of this donation in the past tense implies that it’s done, when it’s not.

    If someone reads or hears that, and hasn’t seen the breakdown further down in AL’s post, they’d be thinking, “great, Africa will be vaccinated within months,” when in actuality, 800M of those 1.1B shots won’t arrive until next year.  And presumably many if not most of the 300M arriving this year are still to come.

    Great that we’re doing it, but the announcement shouldn’t make it sound like everything’s progressed much further than it actually has.  Let’s try “we are donating” if the shots are being loaded on the container ship this week.  Or “we have arranged to donate” if they’re being shipped at some point in the future.

    @Roger Moore: That makes sense for you personally, but what is Doctors Without Borders’ excuse?

    Pardon me, but their excuse for what??

  49. 49.

    prostratedragon

    BioNTech recently announced a deal with South Africa to do finishing stages of their vaccine in SA at a level of 100 million doses per year once it’s up and running. The Reuters article suggests that the point of this from the pharma company perspective is to forestall patent-sharing pressures, which if so strikes me as rather touching. But since the early stages are the most difficult to establish, this might be the best way to increase local production relatively quickly —some time next year.

  51. 51.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Jeffery: Ah, but can we apply this to US domestic politics? Here, liberal soft power seems to be driving conservatives TOWARD war, because they resent it so much. And it doesn’t seem to translate to durable political influence.

  52. 52.

    Betty Cracker

    @Roger Moore: I agree “lefties” aren’t reliable allies (if we’re defining the term narrowly for the purpose of this specific conversation as people with far-left views who aren’t reliable Democratic Party voters), but they’re not always wrong.

    For example, Sinema’s threat to tank the party’s plan to lower drug prices — after she campaigned on the issue, which is supported by the overwhelming majority of Arizonans. Her threat was immediately followed by a huge political ad buy on her behalf by a dark money group that gets a major share of its funding from the pharma lobby.

    A lefty outfit run by David Sirota (feh!) uncovered it, but their sources seem pretty damned solid, e.g., tax filings. Other more mainstream left-of-center publications also ran with the story. Should we ignore it because of the provenance? Is it not useful for Democrats to know this?

  53. 53.

    Baud

    U.S. President Joe Biden plans to nominate Saule Omarova, a law professor who has criticized cryptocurrencies and advocated for the government to have a much bigger role in banking, to run the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday.
    Omarova will be tapped to run the OCC as soon as this week, Bloomberg reported, citing three people familiar with the nomination process. If confirmed, she would be the first woman to become the full-fledged leader of the agency, the report added.

    Reuters

  59. 59.

    gvg

    @Betty: I don’t read that it would be helpful at all in this case. It turns out that it is HARD to make complicated things like modern vaccine at scale and still have them be effective. If you mess up one of the steps, you have a bunch of chemicals that can be dangerous and always aren’t going to protect you from the virus, but if you get that shot, you won’t know that. There is another vaccine, much more promising, that hasn’t been able to scale up and get approval because the company is too new and inexperienced, they keep having problems. The ones that made it to market teamed up with very experienced drug makers.

    So I don’t think waiving the protections will help in this case. I think Biden knows this but recognizes that it has a lot of popular  energy and he may just be giving in so that we can find out that simple solutions aren’t.

  61. 61.

    Baud

    Apropos of what we’re talking about above, Erik Loomis

    I’ve been happy to praise the Biden administration when it has deserved it. But it’s immigration policy truly is barely better than that of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller

    Referring to the Haitian refugees.

  64. 64.

    zhena gogolia

    @Baud: I mean using “it’s” when it should be “its.” I spend my life correcting this.

    It’s just the cherry on the s–t soda.

  65. 65.

    topclimber

    @Baud: Do we at least offer to vaccinate the Haitians we deport? Heck, it might be easier to tell folks to come to America for a certain denial on getting in but so that they get their shot. It might be cheaper and more effective than trying to set up viable vax sites in failed countries.

    Yes, I am grasping at straws. Sometimes they are all you get.

  68. 68.

    WaterGirl

    @Baud: What’s different about the Haitian refugees is that Biden is as appalled as the rest of us at what we saw earlier this week.

    Trump would be cheering on the vile people who still work for ICE and for border control.  Ugh.

  70. 70.

    J R in WV

    @Baud: ​
     

    @Betty Cracker:

    No one is always wrong.

    Seriously? I give you Donald John Trump. I give you Clarence Thomas, AND his wife Ginny! Just for starters!!

    Gov. Abbot X, Gov DeSantis of FL, etc.

  71. 71.

    sab

    Covid etiquette question. I was at my doctor’s office getting a shot today. I arrived on time but had to wait about 15 minutes. Masks are mandatory, and the chairs are all spaced out for social distancing. A mom and her 10 or 11 year old kid came in. Mom went back for her appointment, and the kid stayed behind in the waiting room, quietly reading his phone. The second mom left he pulled his mask down below his chin. I don’t think the receptionist noticed because she was behind a sliding glass window. There were two adults in the waiting room. Neither of us said a thing to the little twerp. Should we have?  I hate scenes as much as the next guy, but iet was a medical office and I know tje doctor takes Covid seriously.

  73. 73.

    Richard

    @Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: 
    I am mostly concerned about Mexico. They live with us. We are married, we are family.
    Everybody likes the tacos, nobody wants to talk about important things.
    It does not help that the government is corrupt in Mexico and United States. They will try to separate us.

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