Worse, if the virus circulates widely enough for enough time, the likelihood that a mutant strain will emerge that is both more infectious *and* more deadly goes up and up.

A half-vaccinated world is like a swimming pool where only one end has a "no pissing" rule.

The global south does not have to go unvaccinated. Poor countries have vast vaccine production capacity: scientists, factories and knowledge. Some of the world's largest vaccine production facilities are in the global south.

2/

What the global south lacks is a patent-free vaccine that can be domestically produced. Remember when Oxford promised that its vaccine would be open access so that it could be produced by poor and rich nations alike?

That dream died when the Gates Foundation - which cloaks monopolistic ideology in elite philanthropy - pressured the university to do an exclusive distribution deal with Astrazeneca.

https://khn.org/news/rather-than-give-away-its-covid-vaccine-oxford-makes-a-deal-with-drugmaker/

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Since then, Gates himself has been pushing the racist lie that countries full of brown people are too primitive to make their own vaccines.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/public-interest-pharma/#gates-foundation

It's a lie that's been picked up by pharma shills like Howard Dean, the one-time "liberal lion" turned corporate mouthpiece:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/08/howard-dino/#the-scream

4/

Gates and Dean are the public face of a vast pharma lobbying effort to head off open access vaccines: more than 100 lobbyists are working DC right now, trying to get the US to oppose a WTO petition to grant emergency patent-waivers on covid vaccines.

https://theintercept.com/2021/04/23/covid-vaccine-ip-waiver-lobbying/

Lobbying disclosures reveal that Big Pharma is paying key Democrat fundraisers, ex-US Trade Rep officials, and GOP power-brokers to fight the proposal, as Lee Fang reports for The Intercept.

5/

The effort is transatlantic, too: a biotech pharma lobbyist repeated the racist lie about poor countries not being capable of manufacturing their own vaccines in The Economist:

https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2021/04/20/michelle-mcmurry-heath-on-maintaining-intellectual-property-amid-covid-19

The Economist editorial really tips the industry's hand, admitting that the industry's real concern is that if they are forced to subordinate their shareholders to the public good, it will raise questions about the whole pharma system.

6/

After all, it's a system that does almost NO basic research, freeriding on publicly funded labs and generates absurd monopoly margins on its products by charging the public vast markups to buy the fruits of the work it subsidized.

These profits are rolled into lobbying projects that keep prices high AND shield pharma execs and investors from the consequences of faking their safety data and deceiving the public (as with the opioid epidemic).

7/

The pharma industry knows, in its heart, that it is engaged in indefensible behavior, and it understands that *any* crack in the rationalizations that secure its fortunes could shatter the illusion altogether.

8/

The industry is so unreasonable that its lobbyists are left with idiotic talking points like: "giving up the IP could allow China and Russia to exploit platforms such as mRNA, which could be used for other vaccines or even therapeutics for conditions such as cancer and heart problems in the future."

https://www.ft.com/content/fa1e0d22-71f2-401f-9971-fa27313570ab

9/