Comment on Microchips
WorkIsSlow@lemmy.world 11 months agoNo clue why you’re being down voted. Youre right.
Gates chose to patent life saving medicine during a global pandemic.
The consequences of that decision are essentially withholding lifesaving medicine because it makes him more money.
schema@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Which vaccine did he patent? As far as I remember he only spoke out for not lifting ongoing patents on the vaccines, and then revered course as criticism grew bigger.
uzay@infosec.pub 11 months ago
Even before any of the vaccines were finished, there were plans to not grant them any patent protection so they can be produced and distributed as widely as possible. Gates and his foundation lobbied hard against that and instead came up with the bullshit plan to have rich countries buy vaccines for poor countries, which helped no one but the insane profits of the pharma companies. In the case of the vaccine developed with public funding by the Oxford University, Gates actively talked them out of releasing it with an open license, so they sold it to AstraZeneca instead.
wired.com/…/opinion-the-world-loses-under-bill-ga…
skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl 11 months ago
I can’t say I’m very convinced by these articles. They say a lot of things, but very little of it actually seems to come back to Gates himself.
Two links deep, I found:
which should be obvious (good luck getting your malaria vaccine produced if you back patent waivers lol).
Another link talks about Microsoft wanting to keep patents around in 2007. Wow, a company making money solely by producing easily copyable software wanting to keep the profits on its R&D? Colour me surprised!
Other links talk about the power billionaires have amassed and how much a problem that is and they may not be wrong about that, but people’s around the world are free to refuse Gates’ money and do things on their own if the don’t want Gates influencing them.
The claim that Gates told Oxford not to open the vaccine seems to have come from this quote:
I think it’s quite realistic to say “you can’t do this on your own” to a small medical research lab. Not like Oxford was going to produce any real vaccine supply by themselves.
I have yet to see any actual quotes from Bill himself about this topic. The closest thing to a real connection that I can find are post hoc ergo proper hoc arguments written by people with unrealistic expectations about the healthcare industry.