Wealthy nations, including these here United States, are, for the most part, way ahead of poor countries in acquiring desperately needed stockpiles of The Vaccines to develop herd immunity to Cover-19.
Jenn White, the host of stellar radio program 1A at WAMU at American University in Washington, had an excellent show this morning on this universally important subject, because poor nations won’t be able to stockpile enough vaccines for their countries until next year.
And until everybody in the world is fully vaccinated, nobody’s really safe.
The consensus of White's panelists was (we are paraphrasing here) that Big Pharma insists that it has a fiduciary duty to its stockholders to make money — and, of course, there is always lotsa money to be made in pharmaceuticals.
So we sent our DC-based Chief Democratic Political Operative, Keith Coleman, to the impressive Constiution Avenue NW headquarters of the American Pharmacists Association (APhA) to talk things over with their President, Michael Hough.
Hough got straight to the point. “Keith,” he said, “it’s all about the bottom line. While our members make thousands of medications (including prescriptions to improve the appearance of peoples’ bottoms), it’s all about the money, and that’s why we’re not willing to waive our intellectual property rights, our patents, for any and all Covid-19 vaccines.”
When Coleman told Hough that he has a direct line to President Biden, Hough cut him short. “That would be a waste of your time, Keith. We’re way too powerful, and Biden knows that we would primary him in 2024 if he were to lobby Congress to make us waive our rights.”
In other news, Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s chief gunslinger, told our Denver-based associate solitary reporter, Lewis Thompson III, how proud he is to have single-handedly convinced a judge in Boulder to toss out Boulder’s ban on assault weapons, following the most recent Slaughter of Innocents at a King Soopers grocery store in Boulder. That judicial decision, based on the Centennial State’s unwieldy Constitution, was made before the 21-year old shooter committed his massacre on Monday.