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The pharmaceutical industry, which thought it had entered the can-do-no-wrong stage of public esteem thanks to its development of COVID-19 vaccines in record time, just got taken down a peg by the Biden administration.
On Wednesday, the administration said it supports waiving patent protections for those same vaccines to help combat the pandemic around the world.
Drugmakers, which were counting on lavish profits from the vaccines, squealed like stuck pigs. Phrma, their leading trade group, called the policy “an unprecedented step that will undermine our global response to the pandemic and compromise safety.”
This is a global health crisis, and the extraordinary circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic call for extraordinary measures.