ReanuKeevesWho are some people in powerful positions or 1%ers that are genuinely good people?
Closest I can think of is post-Microsoft Bill Gates, with the humanitarian/healthcare stuff he’s been involved in. He was a total piece of shit as Microsoft’s CEO, though, what with the aggressive anti-trust practices and all. Not that the ones that came after were much better (especially Ballmer).
ChristianThe Gates foundation explicitly lobbied against Oxford’s initial plan to open source their covid vaccine, Gates’ worship of intellectual propery law is responsible for the patent on the astrazeneca vaccine. The project was initially started under the hope that the third-world being able to manufacture their own vaccines without owing royalties would be important in limiting the spread of covid.
I remember reading about that at the time but couldn’t find a reliable source to back that claim. Fascists and anti-vaxxers love to scapegoat Gates along with George Soros (and jews in general) so I kind of dismissed it as far-right misinfo. Sucks if actually true, though.
A lot of us were genuinely cheering on the announcement that the Oxford vaccine would be opensourced, it was the reason people were actually following updates on that vaccine specifically. It waa a big point of discussion here on lemmy at that time and when the decision was reversed the focal point of every criticism was that it would very obviously limit vaccine accessibility at a time when we desperately needed the population vaccinated as quickly as possible. People were angry over his justifications because even if we assumed the best-case scenario where he were somehow correct and it wouldn’t restrict vaccine access at all, it still would not be an improvement over not having a patent on it. The absolute best case scenario for that reversal would have been vaccination rates being just as high as if it stayed open-source.
I don’t doubt some morons found those headlines after-the-fact and did their own spin without reading, but the idea that antivaccine sentiments and blind Gates-hatred were the motivators for people being upset when that happened is wrong.