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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…

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skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ 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:

But despite Gates’ stated commitment to an equitable distribution of the Covid vaccine, he is refusing to back South Africa and India’s calls for a waiver on patents.

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:

“We went to Oxford and said, Hey, you’re doing brilliant work,” Bill Gates told reporters on June 3, a transcript shows. “But … you really need to team up.” The comments were first reported by Bloomberg.

AstraZeneca, one of the U.K.’s two major pharma companies, may have demanded an exclusive license in return for doing a deal, said Ken Shadlen, a professor at the London School of Economics and an authority on pharma patents—a theory supported by comments from CEO Soriot.

“I think IP [intellectual property, or exclusive patents] is a fundamental part of our industry and if you don’t protect IP, then essentially there is no incentive for anybody to innovate,” Soriot told the newspaper The Telegraph in May.

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.

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