Will China Seize an American Company's Drug For Fighting Coronavirus? (yahoo.com) 142
"Chinese researchers reportedly have applied for a local patent on an experimental Gilead drug that they believe could help fight the novel coronavirus outbreak -- and also significantly bolster Gilead's bottom-line going forward..." reports The Street. "If granted, Gilead will need to get Chinese patent owners on board when it wants to sell the drug for treating the novel coronavirus infection outside China."
"The move is a sign that China views Gilead's therapy as one of the most promising candidates to fight the outbreak that has now claimed almost 500 lives..." Time reports. "While Gilead's experimental drug isn't licensed or approved anywhere in the world, it is being rushed into human trials in China on coronavirus patients after showing early signs of being highly effective."
But China's move concerns Bloomberg Opinion biotech/pharma columnist Max Nisen: If the patent is granted, it will confirm long-standing drugmaker fears about China's commitment to IP protection, raising concern about the industry's future in a crucial market. It also could further erode the already weak incentives for pharma to invest in drugs to combat emerging infectious diseases... [T]he company could see any potential return on the medication curtailed if China starts manufacturing it.
China's increasingly affluent population represents a huge opportunity for drugmakers. Many are investing heavily in the region despite previous data integrity and sales scandals. Leadership has recently demonstrated a greater commitment to IP rights in its initial trade deal with the U.S., but granting this patent could erode trust in the government and scare off foreign drugmakers.
The consequences wouldn't be limited to declining corporate confidence in China, even if this is a one-time emergency event. The world dramatically under-invests in drugs to combat infectious diseases, and a move like this by the Chinese government wouldn't help. Developing such medicines isn't very profitable, compared to drugs for rare diseases and cancer. That's especially true when it comes to emerging viruses, in spite of the obvious risk. Outbreaks are more common in developing countries, which limits pricing power. By the time a company has managed to get approval for any given drug, often a years-long process, there's a good chance that the outbreak will be over.
Seizing the rights to treatments dents drugmakers' already limited incentive to invest in infectious-disease drugs, let alone spend heavily to develop and maintain the ability to respond rapidly to outbreaks and scale up manufacturing. Without the promise of some kind of return, investment is going to dry up. I'm not a rah-rah pharma guy. The industry often abuses the patent system, especially in the U.S., in order to profit for years off of old drugs to the detriment of patients and the health-care system. Its pricing practices are frequently unconscionable. This isn't one of those situations. It's arguably one of the rare cases where the ability of drugmakers to profit needs to be boosted rather than crimped.
"The move is a sign that China views Gilead's therapy as one of the most promising candidates to fight the outbreak that has now claimed almost 500 lives..." Time reports. "While Gilead's experimental drug isn't licensed or approved anywhere in the world, it is being rushed into human trials in China on coronavirus patients after showing early signs of being highly effective."
But China's move concerns Bloomberg Opinion biotech/pharma columnist Max Nisen: If the patent is granted, it will confirm long-standing drugmaker fears about China's commitment to IP protection, raising concern about the industry's future in a crucial market. It also could further erode the already weak incentives for pharma to invest in drugs to combat emerging infectious diseases... [T]he company could see any potential return on the medication curtailed if China starts manufacturing it.
China's increasingly affluent population represents a huge opportunity for drugmakers. Many are investing heavily in the region despite previous data integrity and sales scandals. Leadership has recently demonstrated a greater commitment to IP rights in its initial trade deal with the U.S., but granting this patent could erode trust in the government and scare off foreign drugmakers.
The consequences wouldn't be limited to declining corporate confidence in China, even if this is a one-time emergency event. The world dramatically under-invests in drugs to combat infectious diseases, and a move like this by the Chinese government wouldn't help. Developing such medicines isn't very profitable, compared to drugs for rare diseases and cancer. That's especially true when it comes to emerging viruses, in spite of the obvious risk. Outbreaks are more common in developing countries, which limits pricing power. By the time a company has managed to get approval for any given drug, often a years-long process, there's a good chance that the outbreak will be over.
Seizing the rights to treatments dents drugmakers' already limited incentive to invest in infectious-disease drugs, let alone spend heavily to develop and maintain the ability to respond rapidly to outbreaks and scale up manufacturing. Without the promise of some kind of return, investment is going to dry up. I'm not a rah-rah pharma guy. The industry often abuses the patent system, especially in the U.S., in order to profit for years off of old drugs to the detriment of patients and the health-care system. Its pricing practices are frequently unconscionable. This isn't one of those situations. It's arguably one of the rare cases where the ability of drugmakers to profit needs to be boosted rather than crimped.
Wot? Saving lives by violating IP? (Score:4, Insightful)
The bastards!
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YOU WOULDN'T DOWNLOAD A CURE
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Your disease is a prime business opportunity. While coronavirus may be a personal tragedy for you and your family, spare a thought for the Big Pharma executive who is depending on that virus to fund his 3rd yacht. Take comfort in the knowledge that while you have to decide which of your children gets the cure at least he can get that genuine baby seal skin upholstery upgrade.
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The choice isn't between expensive new lifesaving drugs and cheap ones. It's between expensive new lifesaving drugs and none.
Thanks for viewing the world as a static one where you seize what already exists and hand it out, rather than a dynamic one where people still die fullscale and always need new things for problems ancient and 5 minutes ago.
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My point was that maybe we should rethink the whole concept of healthcare being for-profit. We all need it eventually, we should just pay for development of new drugs out of taxation.
The whole global phrama industry only invests about 130-140 billion/year in R&D. It's really very affordable.
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How do you think we currently pay for development of new drugs? The US government is the only government in the world that pumps billions of dollars into R&D. Sure, private investment is at ~$140B, NIH is $40B, or about 2/3 of the entire world's investment into government-funded health research.
If you take out the profit motive, you end up with no further investment, why would I develop out something and potentially go bankrupt doing it if there is no payout later on?
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You're supposed to do it out of some altruistic desire to work hard to give him free stuff while he sits on his ass doing nothing. That's what all socialists believe.
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How do you think we currently pay for development of new drugs? The US government is the only government in the world that pumps billions of dollars into R&D.
The U.S., having one of the largest economies and populations in the world (largest economy until recently) has not surprisingly invested a larger amount of money than any other single country. But in 2012 it accounted for slightly less than half of world public medical research funding ($50.5 billion out $102.8 billion). So not the only government. U.S. industry however only invested 40% of the world industry medical research ($66.6 billion out of $162.2 billion), so U.S. industry was not pulling as much w
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You're wasting your time arguing with the trolls. Next thing you'll be dragging in such irrelevant facts as all the diseases that were cured or eradicated at government expense. Or the gawdawful examples of sincere charities that helped people.
To me the most interesting part of for-profit pharmaceutical research is how it affects the research priorities. If the goal is profit, then what sort of drugs do you want to develop? Imagine you are the pharmaceutical executive deciding between developing a one-time
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Your disease is a prime business opportunity. While coronavirus may be a personal tragedy for you and your family, spare a thought for the Big Pharma researchers trying to fund an R&D team to develop and test drugs to fight cancer and other diseases. Take comfort in the knowledge that while you have to decide which of your children gets the cure at least the Chinese government, which could easily afford the license, is stalling and playing games just like they do with mundane IP issues.
FIFY
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Re:Wot? Saving lives by violating IP? (Score:5, Informative)
There are actually provisions in the patent treaties for sovereign states to used patented materials in emergencies, specifically meant for medicines in the case of major disease outbreaks and the like. I can't remember the exact mechanism but I think they effectively make the drug a generic for the duration of the emergency. So what China is doing is specifically allowed under the patent regime.
Re:Wot? Saving lives by violating IP? (Score:4, Interesting)
national laws may authorize the judiciary, the executive, or an administrative body to issue a compulsory licence to manufacture or import a patented drug without the permission of the patent holder in circumstances where licensing negotiations with the patent holder have failed or in cases of emergency or government use, in order to achieve the governmentâ(TM)s policy of providing universal access to medicines, diagnostics, vaccines or medical devices.
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Nothing in there says they can also grant a patent to a local company to pretend they invented it, and let them seek rent from others for it.
There is a huge difference in allowing emergency use without licensing, and granting a patent for something they didn't invent.
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they want to produce it so they can sell it to everyone and undercut the company that spend the money to develop it.
And how would they be able to do that?
When the emergency is over, the law exceptions cease. They can not sell it legally to the rest of the planet.
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The exceptions never included granting a patent in the first place.
Do you even ponimayu Angliski?
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Same goes for the US, the US however is a capitalist system, they will know that payment for the use of a medication is necessary, even if the government takes over production, so further R&D is stimulated. China is a communist dictatorship, they'll simply take and redistribute giving no incentive for the next SARS drug to be invented.
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I know what you choose. You choose death, stagnation, and self-righteous indignation.
This couldn't have happened to nicer people (Score:3)
Gilead Sciences finds itself being the screwee rather than the screwer.
Funny definition of being screwed (Score:4, Insightful)
A plague on both their houses! (Score:5, Insightful)
Never has that sentiment been more appropriate (and inappropriate at the same time...)
Fuck the chinese government and their policy of taking whatever they want from whomever it belongs to.
Fuck big pharma and their policy of "Give us all your money, or die horribly. And you had better have more money tomorrow or you will die horribly then!"
People need medicine. But cutting edge medical research costs a lot.
There needs to be a balance allowing a reasonable amount of profit to fund future research while keeping medicines affordable to those that need them.
Re:A plague on both their houses! (Score:4, Informative)
It has been repeatedly proven that modern pharmaceuticals spend more on 'ADVERTISING' than on 'REASEARCH'. Often the research is done by government, then bought for cents on the dollar compared to corporate patent fees loaded on top.
Reality is, if government directly funds medical research and kicks for profit corporations out of research, we would all be far better off.
Ahh the delusional lies of capitalism. Perhaps the USA should start world war three over patents and copyright, they are certainly corrupt and insane enough.
Re:A plague on both their houses! (Score:4, Insightful)
Lifesaving medicine development really seems like something that should be done as a CERN-style public international collaboration.
Leave private industry the penis pills.
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Yeah yeah, public programs terrible, private enterprise awesome. How's that private health care system going for you? Too bad that Apollo program thing wasn't private. Might have made it to the moon.
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So many people forget that a large amount of medical research is funded by government grants and organizations, especially the important stuff: cures.
As for the Internet, it was way more awesome and free when it was managed by universities. I loved "surfing" the web back then. Today's Internet is nothing but ads and endless whining that there's not enough money to go around. That's precisely why I don't own a smartphone.
It's the only thing that motivates (Score:5, Informative)
there is a long list of "small" pharma companies that have like 1 or 2 drugs and their entire company is dependent on it. I think you're also underestimating the cost. It takes years and fuck tons of money to develop something that actually works AND is safe AND is able to be manufactured in a volume with a half life that will be usable, proper storage, tracking etc. If you read the annual reports for some of this companies you can see that they're always the subject of dozens if not hundreds of lawsuits.
The fact is, medicine is something literally everyone needs. If you want the cost to go down you need single payer as a starting point. But it's the money that incentivizes everything and without that a lot of of these drugs would simply not exist.
That's even more true for drugs with a small market i.e. gov't subsidized Orphan drugs.
However R&D, etc isn't the biggest driving factor. My guess is it's between the hospitals/insurance companies marking shit up and the stock market. Your own retirement plan is pushing drug prices higher by virtue of having managers that focus on stock price and quarterly returns. They can make billions but if it doesn't meet Wall Street expectations by a quarter of a % people get fired, literally. Problems this big do not have 1 cause; they have many.
Source: Wife works for a major pharma company and I recently started investing in a few smaller companies with life saving drugs. I have a least a very tiny window to how the sausage is made.
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Good on the Chinese government for making sure its citizens get the cure. It's immoral to withhold it when it can be cheaply manufactured and save many lives just because some executive's bonus will be reduced slightly.
Gilead chooses to make massive profits rather than help people. That's immoral. It could still do all the same R&D and just make a bit less money.
And not just in China either, they gouge Americans with ridiculous prices too. Imagine if the outbreak took hold in the US and the drugs cost $
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China has tons of money. They can afford it. There is nothing noble about what they do. Stop pretending it's a Dickens novel period.
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Unfortunately, investors often refuse to create breakthroughs when they might be unprofitable:
https://www.wired.com/story/th... [wired.com]
(or they just fail)
We need more people like Jonas Salk, who was neither profit-oriented nor a totalitarian collectivist. You could argue that his push to make vaccines mandatory was too strident (making him a bit of a control freak), but since he had no patent for his vaccine, it wasn't really a profit-oriented action.
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Individual cases are not data. What matters are long-term trends of benefits. There was useful stuff invented or discovered in every country, including the USSR and Cuba. Just not so much of it.
They've even found invention productivity in European drug companies is proportional to whether they sell into the evil US for bigger profits.
This works to get you a new iPhone or Android or 3D processor every year. And that's just fluff. How much more important to crank out new cures every year.
I think trying t
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Dividends paid on pharma stocks are not what makes future research possible.
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Sabin's oral polio vaccine was tested in the USSR, not developed there. Sabin was born in Poland but immigrated to the USA. Because freedom vs. communism.
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Wow, that's really leaving out a lot of important details.
There were two polio vaccines developed and both started in the US. The oral polio vaccine however, ended up paralyzing almost 200 patients from a faulty batch of vaccine. Since the US already had a safer vaccine by that point, the oral polio vaccine research was kicked out of the US and its researcher moved to the USSR to continue his work.
The statement, "THE oral polio vaccine was developed in the USSR," while strictly truthful, is highly misleadin
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Their job, the reason they exist, is LITERALLY to protect their citizens.
That's ironic.
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The count of reported deaths seems off (Score:3)
"The death toll from the coronavirus outbreak rose to 700 in mainland China, with the death of a 60-year-old American man marking the first confirmed non-Chinese death from the illness"
— Reuters (@Reuters) February 8, 2020
and I said "Reported Deaths"
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The West is probably overreacting - because histrionic wails of torment and predictions of inevitable impending doom are the default reaction of the news media - but of course the Chinese are downplaying it. There may have been a few more accurate totals posted/leaked (I saw something like 24,000 dead earlier in the week, who knows if it was real or hype) but only those on the ground actually know.
The Chinese have always lied about disasters, just like the USSR and all other dictatorships,
Re: The count of reported deaths seems off (Score:2)
If China lies about the deaths and outside of China there has only been one death with more than 300 infections: Are all others lying too?
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The Chinese government is not worse? Are you out of your mind? They're still lying about Xianjing.
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Just like some (vocal) Americans don't want to see others hear complain about the stuff that happens in the US and as a result they become defensive, some (vocal) people from other nationalities react the same way.
False equivalency, relative privation, whatouabisms, and false dichotomies are to be found everywhere.
Shitty arguments made by people who thinly veiled national pride i
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Oops, meant Xinxiang, not Xianjing. My bad.
And yeah it's typical, but still not acceptable.
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And it seems especially dumb when it comes to making China look better than the US.
I mean I'd even rather live in Saudi Arabia right now than under the Chinese government.
Actually it's all a conspiracy (Score:2)
And the real solution is "forsythia" or powdered rhino horn
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Woops. Too bad there aren't enough rhinoceri left in the world.
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Why are you applying a Latin plural to a Greek word while writing in English?
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I've got a couple of forsythia's growing here I could sacrifice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Public funding (Score:2)
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China did not file patent on the drug (Score:5, Informative)
When come to patent, the fine-prints matters:
1) the patent filed by the Chinese lab covering the application of Remdesivir to treat the 2019 nCorona virus, not the formulation of the drug. This is like saying if you discover Coke can treat that virus, you can too file a patent and Coca-Cola can't stop you from doing so.
2) whether or not such patent application can be granted depends on what the original inventor of the drug has applied their patents for. In this case, if Gilead applied the drug to treat only Ebola (as it was originally intended for) and nothing else, then the Chinese claim is very valid; however if Gilead's patent covers all corona virus (and with evidence to that claim,) then the Chinese claim is not likely to be granted;
3) Patent laws in all countries include clause that allow the state to use the patent without permission of the owner under the disasters and other national security matters; the current virus outbreak can definitely qualify for such circumstance. So if China choose to enlist this patent and make the medicines without paying, they can. However, it is no unlike that China will do that, especially the amount of money involve look not that big unless tens of millions of people are infected.
Referencepatent expert analysis [yicai.com] (in Chinese)
So all in all, you could claim these Chinese researchers commit patent trolling. But hey the US force them to play the patent game.
Beside the US itself has done similar patent grabbing in the past.
Colonial authorities did not distinguish between patents awarded on the account of originality and those on the account of introduction (from existing patent/tech in Europe
Trade Secretes: Intellectual Piracy and the Origins of American Industrial Power [eh.net], p.p. 43.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
But (Score:2)
Open source vaccines (Score:2)
Instead of stealing they could fund the testing, verification, and deployment of any of the numerous open source Coronavirus vaccine designs. Just saying.
Here is one:
https://github.com/feraliscatu... [github.com]
Gilead offered the drug very cheap before ... (Score:4, Informative)
Gilead has in the past offered Hepatitis C drugs with 99% discount [reuters.com] to Egypt, where Hepatitis C has the highest incidence in the world.
They later licensed it as a generic drug [nytimes.com].
I don't see why they would not do the same here.
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China has fuck you money compared to Egypt.
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Holy shit. Even with a 99% discount, a round of treatment still costs $900? That's "very cheap?"
The invisible hand... (Score:3)
So leaving it up to the invisible hand of the markets doesn't look like a viable option for infectious diseases & I doubt that giving even more monopolistic power to big pharma would have much of a beneficial effect & more than likely do a great deal of harm, e.g. further limiting & restricting the use of generic drugs & enabling yet more price gouging.
Global pandemics need international co-ordination to deal with & prevent, so it's up to governments to think ahead & make commitments to do this. Vaccination programmes are likely to be the most effective in terms of cost & saving lives, as they are for flu & other contagious diseases. We've also seen what happens when anti-vaxxers are allowed to mislead the public.
Remember that Jonas Salk developed the first safe & effective polio vaccine at the University of Pittsburgh & made it freely available to everyone for all eternity. That's how vaccines are supposed to work; cheap & freely available to everyone so we get herd immunity, in the same way corporate profits reduce the efficacy of vaccines. No big pharma company would be interested in this. Screw big pharma, we have to do this for ourselves through our own public universities & healthcare systems... well, those countries that have public healthcare systems.
I fuckin hope so! (Score:3)
Only the most psychopathic libertarian fascist would pick corporate profits over human survival.
(Granted, this whole thing is an *insanely* over-hyped scare. But anti-granted, that's.
exactly the case *because* some psycho wants to make a profit [aka robbery] with it.)
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Only the most psychopathic leftist communist would force a free person to do their bidding.
The government has the right to seize things with compensation in case of emergency, but if you don't do the compensation, there is no incentive for future production. If the government could just take your house whenever they wanted for whatever excuse without compensation, why would you want to invest in home ownership? Even if the road makes a shortcut to a hospital, I'm sure you wouldn't be happy that they just st
I am a GILD investor (Score:2)
WHO will sort it out (Score:2)
The answer (Score:2)
> Will China Seize an American Company's Drug For Fighting Coronavirus?
If that's the only way to get it then they damn well better.
nCov-2019 has a 2.1% fatality rate and there are over a billion people in China. We can argue over the finer points of compensation as much as you'd like, but killing 20 million people over IP rights is not a thing.
Not a seizure. (Score:2)
We'd be much better off with a complete abolition of Copyright and patent than what we have right now (note, I did leave "trademark" but only as reasonably used, not trademarking "look and feel", as trademark is an anti-fraud use). Bypassing IP for a single drug to save lives? Who could possibly be against that? Oh yeah, America, who would rather see profit, and doesn't care how many people have to die to ge
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Also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
about 60 years ago.
So STFU
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More people die in car accidents. Hyperbole much?
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An accident is an accident.
Lack of health care is failed politics, or do you really wonder why Europeans consider the USA a third world country?
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Your "free" healthcare would bring rationing and flat out refusal to treat people who behave certain in unapproved ways. ... but perhaps you have an example?
Strangely that never happened.
We see that everywhere your "free" healthcare is offered.
Actually you don't
How many of them would die from a lack of healthcare?
In a case like this? No one. They would die for the typical cases, weak immune system due to old age etc., not due to lack of health care.
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The NIH in England for one. Canada is another. There's a reason people with means in both countries come to the US for treatment.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-en... [bbc.com]
https://nationalfile.com/uk-ho... [nationalfile.com]
https://www.gadsbywicks.co.uk/... [gadsbywicks.co.uk]
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Whoops, NHS in England.
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Better links regarding NHS rationing and refusal of care based on behavior:
https://www.theguardian.com/so... [theguardian.com]
https://www.bbc.com/news/healt... [bbc.com]
https://www.independent.co.uk/... [independent.co.uk]
https://www.thenewamerican.com... [thenewamerican.com]
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/he... [dailymail.co.uk]
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He's just parroting something he heard somewhere. It's not even correct.
https://www.nytimes.com/2003/0... [nytimes.com]
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Widespread famine has never occurred in a country with democracy with a free press.
Not quite correct. Widespread famine has never occurred in a country with advanced industry.
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The link there is that peasant economies are not conducive to the growth of democracy, and peasant economies are also prone to famines, because the vast majority of the population is locked into subsistence farming, so a couple of bad years in a row and you're running out of food, with each peasant no longer able to produce enough food to feed themselves, let alone feed others.
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He obviously was sarcastic ...
Re: Assuming the wrong thing (Score:2)
Countries with widespread famines have more pressing problems than democracy and individual freedom. The latter are pretty much a
luxury.
Don't bring autism into this! (Score:2)
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the Chinese government *have already done things much like this*
Sure, if we go back to the days of Chairman Mao. You might as well say "the German government have already done things like this", and accuse Angela Merkel of being a Nazi.
They are indeed psychotic monsters, as are all communists
Would "communists" include the entire population of China, or just specific people that you are trying to demonize?
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The Chinese gov't cares about preserving their teetering economy (inflated GDP) and preserving the Communist Party, both if which are threatened by this virus. The ruling elite would not think twice about killing millions of their own people to accomplish those goals, it just so happens they need those people working in factories to maintain the GDP and if they started killing them the rest would have another revolution but AGAINST communism this time.
Chinese authorities at this moment are boarding people
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homes and forcing people who MIGHT have the virus into camps^H^H^H^H^H.
You misspelled hospitals.
We can all be glad that such an outbreak is unlikely to happen in your puny country. Desasters like Katrina show, you would not be able to do anything. Except for putting signs into the windows: "You loot, we shoot!"
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No, they're sending them to "quarantine camps" now. The hospitals are full.
https://arstechnica.com/scienc... [arstechnica.com]
https://www.theguardian.com/wo... [theguardian.com]
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ne... [dailymail.co.uk]
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He put an asterisk after that sentence. I assume the footnote got left out, but went something like:
* on TV
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Um....
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
* https://www.history.com/topics... [history.com]
Modern China isn't a human rights spectacular, but it's also not Mao and the great leap forward. Just like the US and UK today hesitates to destroy entire cities.
It's distressing that our educational system is turning out people who think blind nationalism plus personal insults make a coherent argument. Also ones who can't write full sentences.
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The communists. That is, leadership and those who join the party. People who are not, or are coerced, are of course different, they are the victims of communism.
Your nihilism and false equivalencies don't help them, or anyone.
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Perhaps you haven't seen there isn't much difference between the days of Chairman Mao and now, except for the media coverage because the media is now rooting for China-style policies here in the US.
- People are frequently abducted by the government for political purposes
- People are frequently abducted by the government to harvest them for organs
- Protests and demonstrations are violently suppressed
- There is no freedom of speech
- Farmers, migrants and prisoners are literally enslaved by the government
- Pol
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The Uighers might take issue with your benign characterization of modern Beijing, and you conveniently omit that Maoism was not overthrown, it simply faded after he died and his remaining minions were purged.
Re: Assuming the wrong thing (Score:2)
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You hope so?
Actually I don't think so. If you look at the Katrina disaster I would bet: no one in a position of power will do anything.
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Well don't know much because the Chinese authorities weren't honest about it from the start and are CLEARLY lying to us today about what's going on. As of today they have quarantined 400 million people. That's more than the entire US population. They wouldn't be doing that for the flu or if the contagion threat and death rate is what they're telling us.
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As of today they have quarantined 400 million people. That's more than the entire US population. They wouldn't be doing that for the flu or if the contagion threat and death rate is what they're telling us.
You would not do that. Because you are a racist asshole and don't care who dies.
They care. They do. The current/actual death rate is probably pretty close to what they tell us. But you are simply an asshole, can't be helped.
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Ah yes, speak out against Communism and you're a raaaycissst! OK Boomer!
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I'm not sure you understand what's going on in Cuba or in China. They are both communist dictatorships (the only way to maintain a communist/socialist state). The Castro's aren't nice people. Xi is not a nice person. People get disappeared in both countries all the time, for political reasons, for organ 'donations', for not meeting production quota's, for speaking out or protesting, for having Internet, for blogging or other forms of journalism.
If it was so good in Cuba, why do thousands of Cubans cross the
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If it was so good in Cuba, why do thousands of Cubans cross the ocean or go through Mexico to get to the US on a yearly basis?
Because they suck at propaganda? Why else would you think a Cuban, who had never lived in the US, know anything about what it's like to live in the US?
Meanwhile, Americans all think Cuba is some sort of shithole. But the reality is, life expectancy in Cuba is exactly the same as that of the US: 79.7 years.
Only people who's lived in both countries can realistically comment on it. And even then we need to hear from both people who moved to the US and people who moved to Cuba, as well as people of different so
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Cuba has the best health care system in the world, and the best education for healthcare.
They are the number one contributor in health emergencies on the planet or developing aid in health care. As in sending doctors and medical personal all over the world and actually helping people. There is no single nation on the planet that is even in the ten percent range of what Cuba is contributing to the planet in educating local people,setting up hospitals and clinics and actually doing the field work and sending
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The cost of developing a few drugs is far less than the cost of the virus spreading..
The point was not that the service is overall not beneficial but that we publicly fund the service such as military, police, etc so that the benefits all of us.
Re: Are they patenting the drug or this specific u (Score:2)
They did that to defend themselves against the actual drug patent. If this drug works they will need a lot of it and donâ(TM)t want to fight patents to help their people to survive this. This way they can do some cross-licensing to solve this problem.