On 20 May 2020, abelard wrote
>
> you seem to have some foundation belief that all 'students' can
> achieve a similar level of comprehension...
> i don't suffer the 'same' belief....the greater proportion of
> politicians and 'reporters' don't seem to be capable of quite
> fundamental reasoning skills.....
>
> and most of them have been thoroughly 'educated' within the blob...
On 5 May, the British security services released to their pet media the claim
that Russia, China and Iran were attempting to hack into British research
institutes conducting coronavirus research. The BBC reported it
(
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-52551023).
Britain’s shameful copy and paste media all, without exception, just copy
and pasted the government press release.
The Guardian gave the quote
(
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/03/hostile-states-trying-to-steal-
coronavirus-research-says-uk-agency):
“Any attack against efforts to combat the coronavirus crisis is utterly
reprehensible. We have seen an increased proportion of cyber-attacks related
to coronavirus and our experts work around the clock to help organisations
targeted”.
If Britain had one single mainstream media journalist willing to think,
rather than just regurgitate government propaganda, they might have realised
that there is a massive story here if you look at it the other way round. The
quote from the Guardian deliberately attempted to give the impression that
Russia, China and Iran were trying to disable, destroy or hamper coronavirus
research: “Any attack against efforts to combat the coronavirus”.
But if you read carefully through those articles, you find that the
allegation is merely that they are attempting hack in to gain access to the
research.
Because the UK and the US are attempting to hide their vaccine and treatment
research results from the rest of the world to make money out of them.
Much has been written about the possibility for a new and better kind of
world to emerge after coronavirus. Yet our governments cannot conceive of any
model for fighting this threat to the whole world, other than the capitalist,
money-making model. The much-touted “race to develop a vaccine” is not a
race to save lives. It is a race to make billions.
The United States and the United Kingdom are working in all international
fora to head off efforts to pool global research and to make any vaccine or
medicine a good for the world. Governments can reward those working on the
vaccine, and the companies for providing the facilities, using economic
models other than the patent and the potential for massive profit.
It may come as a shock to you to realise that at the moment all those lovely
vaccine and medicine researchers you see being interviewed on TV about their
efforts to compress trials and approvals and get the product to the
marketplace, are not sharing their results with fellow researchers around the
world. They are rather jealously guarding them and each working in a bubble
hoping to be the first in order to cash in. It is certainly true that many of
the researchers themselves do not like this, but are controlled by their
bosses.
For me, the failure to set up a worldwide shared scientific database on all
coronavirus vaccine and medicine research, and the failure to set up a prior
agreement on free manufacture worldwide of effective resulting vaccines and
treatments, is the most revealing fact about the entire coronavirus episode.
The fact that the British government is putting massive resources into
ensuring the Chinese or Russians cannot “steal” our research – and
doubtless the Chinese and Russians are doing the same, all states are
hypocrites in these matters – should sicken everybody.
Our politicians repeatedly attack China for an alleged lack of openness on
the pandemic while upholding a profit-led model for tackling it. That model
not only excludes openness on research but necessitates security service
action to protect the research from being accessed by other researchers in
other countries whose collaboration could be invaluable to the world.
There is a report tucked away in today’s Guardian that opens a window on
all this:
>
> The sole resolution before the assembly this year is an EU proposal for a voluntary patent pool. Drug and vaccine companies would then be under pressure to
give up the monopoly that patents allow them on their inventions, which means
they can charge high prices, so that all countries can make or buy affordable
versions.
>
>
> In the weeks of negotiations leading up to the meeting, which is scheduled to last for less than a day, there has been a dispute over the language of the
resolution. Countries with major pharmaceutical companies argue they need
patents to guarantee sufficiently high prices in wealthy nations to recoup
their research and development costs.
>
>
> Even more fraught have been attempts to reinforce countries’ existing rights to break drug and vaccine company patent monopolies if they need to for the
sake of public health. A hard-fought battle over Aids drugs 20 years ago led
to the World Trade Organization’s Doha declaration on trade-related
intellectual property (Trips) in favour of access to medicines for all, but
the US, which has some of the world’s biggest drug companies, has strongly
opposed wording that would encourage the use of Trips.
But this refers to protecting the rights in the product eventually to be
manufactured. There is prior action needed on lifting all veils on research
and the free interflow in real time between companies, institutions and
nations of all research ideas and date in the struggle to develop vaccines
and treatments. It should be a great joint enterprise bringing the world
together, not a race between nations to cash in. The free real time sharing
of all research worldwide could make progress substantially quicker, to the
benefit of everybody on the planet we share.
If we cannot put aside profit in favour of altruism as the motive in the
fight against a massive common threat, then I despair for the future of human
society. No wonder we are prey to pandemics.
© Craig Murray 2020