They rightly fear that in 2-3 years, when the pandemic is likely over everywhere and other people have figured out how to commercialize the IP, they won't be the only ones producing their vaccines.
This isn't going to help India or anyone in the short term and there'll be more than enough doses for every person on Earth by next year. Why should they not retain the IP rights to make a profit on new generations that need to be vaccinated or potential booster shots? The manufacturing capacity will have been built up so scarcity won't be a problem at that point.
Is it reasonable to believe that the knowledge that the USA doesn't intend to support the pursuit of damages for patent violation would have an impact on manufacturers now.
If you held a firm conviction that in the near future you'd be able to act on the IP without being in violation, would you be more motivate to progress toward doing so more swiftly?
As a patent holder, would you feel more secure that you could issue cease and desist notices and peruse damages after the waiver is lifted?
Simple, the Indian vaccine factories already have licenses to produce these vaccines but are struggling to scale up production: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-55571793 (in part because they can't get some of the supplies needed, which maybe could be helped if the patents for those are also waived and other factories can help to make those...)
This is about mRNA vaccines, but similar things exist for viral vector vaccines as well. Technology transfer, bioreactor bags, fill-finish capacity, all of these things are bottlenecked till next year basically.
Just search for Pfizer 3 billion (that's the annual rate they expect to be at by the end of the year).
The population you want to cover and how long it is allowed to take are both factors in whether production is a limit, so there isn't really one answer as to whether production rate is a factor.
So, everyone here has realized how inane this article is given that it doesn't account for the price of Fe and Ni plummeting once this much supply is introduced to the market.
But what is the actual value of something like this? Surely something comparable has happened in the past where a big reserve of some rare mineral has been found and monopolized, and its price didn't go to zero.
We live over a much larger ball full of Fe and Ni.
In fact, the actual value of a hard to get Fe reserve is 0. The ground is full of it, and it's much easier to get here. We would have to compare the costs of mining an asteroid with deep mining on Earth to discover if the Ni has any value, it's very likely 0 too, but I don't think anybody knows for sure.
If you're referring to the earth's iron-nickel core, then the comparison is moot. Mining an asteroid is theoretically feasible. Mining the earth's core is not.
Hum, no. The crust is full of Fe already. It is probably much cheaper to get it from dirt than from this asteroid, but it's concentrated on a huge amount of places.
If it was about the core, the answer for Ni would also be obvious.
> It is probably much cheaper to get it from dirt than from this asteroid
Well, delivery costs play a role as well.
If you're looking for iron for use on Earth, you're right. If you're looking for iron to use in space construction, the asteroid material is likely much cheaper.
If one believes (as I do) that the human race will either move into space or go extinct, then asteroids will be far more important for the future of our society.
Simple solution: just crash this 140 mile diameter asteroid into Australia so it's accessible and cheap to mine. Afterwards the prices of iron and nickel would drop to zero!
There was a lot of inflation in Spain during the 16th century because of all of the gold and silver mined from the Americas. Some estimate prices rose by 300% in a century.
The rise in prices made Spanish exports uncompetitive, forcing Spain to spend its bullion to buy finished imports from other countries.
US inflation has been over 1000% in the last century. Lots of money being made in the last century, and lots more people. Sorry for the tangent, had to look it up.
It seems impossible to predict. The reason the price would not go to zero would be that, at the new lower price point, newly viable applications are found. What will these applications be? We can only guess.
We already do. Several grades of stainless steel use a lot of nickel, and these are used in many applications. Also it is quite expensive which prevents it from being used generally.
>Surely something comparable has happened in the past where a big reserve of some rare mineral has been found and monopolized, and its price didn't go to zero.
Aluminum. Initially so expensive that the tip of the Washington Monument was made with it, then price plummetted after new refining methods.
With concerns about there being so much Fe and Ni that the market would be completely destabilized, it makes me wonder what it would cost to mine and smelt it all into raw materials. It must require a staggering amount of energy.
There's plenty of diamonds around and they're still doing OK. I guess it depends on someone's ability to drip feed it into the market and fix the prices. Kinda like bitcoin whales too.
When the king of Mali would go on sabbatical their country was so much more wealthy than everywhere else that they would spread so much wealth they would topple whole monetary systems.
I don't understand why there's a comparison with the UK vaccination program at play here. Your comment is precisely the type of incendiary fallacy that OP is accusing the BBC if.
EU is claiming that AZ is breaching the contract it had with them. Whether they are in the right or not, what does the UK's relationship with AZ have to do with it?
And has AstraZeneca claimed that this would cause them to fail on their commitments to the UK? Or are we presuming that because it benefits some other agenda?
> has AstraZeneca claimed that this would cause them to fail on their commitments to the UK?
I believe the UK has made the claim that they have exclusive contractual right to domestically-made vaccines until a certain point. Not sure if AstraZeneca corroborated.
INAL, but I'd say nothing. The contract includes the UK as part of the EU as far as manufacturing is concerned (paragraph 5.4). But kicking AZ already now with breach of contract is a bit wild. As is pushing false numbers regaridng efficiency of the vaccine for eople above 60 (or 65), as happened in Germany. Not quite a good way to motivate AZ to deliver, it rather makes it a legal question from the getgo. Which is, well, not good.
Do you seriously think he's against encryption for his own class of unfathomably rich peers?
He's against encryption for the commoners, the 99.999% of people not part of the transnational elite, who as we've seen in the Epstein case can fly around and do more or less what they want with both people and money because of connections to "intelligence".
Do what they want, until they end up hanging from a jail house ceiling?
I find it somewhat uncomfortable Posting a comment that might seem pro rich, and he did initially get away with minimal penalties, but you didn’t exactly pick the poster boy for Unlimited impunity.
Well it's all pretty muddy, but so far i think Epstein was expendable.
As i just wrote there are a myriad of links to "intelligence" and a larger structure.
If people are interested go to the Epstein subreddit take deep dive - most likely it was a classic honeypot operation to blackmail high ranking politicians for political gain or for some industrial complex - not a lone wolf with a back story that makes no sense in isolation, suddenly getting rich without anyone knowing why.
Two conspiracy theorist die and go to heaven. At the pearly gates they are let in and allowed to ask god one question. They ask him, about the Epstein suicide, and god replies “no my sons, there was no conspiracy, it was in fact suicide”
The conspiracy theorists turn to one another and remark, “This goes even higher than we thought”
It's a super gray area i agree, and people can become obsessed with "patterns".
I personally find it interesting like i find the Snowden revelations interesting, or the Wikileaks implications or geopolitics in general.
I started majoring in history before going into tech so i don't personally find any of these "conspiracies" fringe or stupid seen in a historical context of for example US intelligence organisations throughout the 20's century - obviously non organic campaigns like qAnon is something completely different but this info is from classic journalism.
But i can see that those top-down campaigns has really turned people away from even the slightest deviation of the "official narrative" now, so well, qAnon and other psyops really are working - there is only the mainstream, and the idiots left.
Because the market is not pricing this as a signal that the "sum of all future free cash flow" is in jeopardy.
Governments all over the world have implemented financial relief to these companies by promising to shoulder the cost of wages through the normal unemployment benefit system. Companies taking advantage of that during this extraordinary period doesn't say much about what their profitability will look like after the lockdowns are over.
In fact, in some cases this could be evidence of a flexible company that is able to scale down quickly and is more likely to survive this and future demand shocks.
Why do Americans believe trying to interpret the Founding Father's intent is a reasonable way to debate policy? If the opinions of 18th century wealthy men have merit today it should be because we believe their reasoning applies to current circumstances, not because they were the Founders of anything.
I'm not saying I necessarily disagree that "a small accountable republic driven to progress only on issues where there was minimal to no opposition" is desirable today, but you have put forward no valid argument for it.
What the grandparent comment did was bring the Founding Fathers into the discussion, took an idea from them, and then presented it in light of current events. You can evaluate the grandparent comment's idea without including the Founding Fathers; the reference is relevant only to show the changes that have occurred in the last 200 years.
...because we have documents (e.g. the Federalist Papers [1]) that explain their philosophy and arguments. Moreover, significant technological advances aside, our basic psychology / neurobiology remains virtually unchanged, and so many of their initial insights into mitigating the risks of human political systems still pertain.
For instance: they foresaw the problems powerful interests acting in bad faith could cause, and so we now enjoy judicial recourse when politicians or appointees make arbitrary, capricious, or corrupt decisions. The fact that we're discussing legal challenges to the FCC's decision as even a possibility underscores this point.
We understand more about human psychology / neurobiology now, of course, so this is one limitation of uncritically accepting their advice. We also have the benefit of over two centuries of additional hindsight. Still, I think there is good reason to at least consider the opinions of people who would, by any reasonable reckoning, count as political systems design experts of their time.
"government maximizes the freedom of the people by preventing the infringement of such freedom except in cases such that there is a mass consensus of its merit" seems pretty clear. The argument is that the freedoms the founding fathers wanted to preserve are protected by making it hard for corrupt politicians to take them away. The vision of the founding fathers is taken seriously because they were very smart and America has been very successful in many respects.
