Wednesday, February 3, 2021
This post is a departure from my blog s industry focus that I wouldn t have contemplated if not for the highly unusual circumstances we re facing in the COVID-19 pandemic. The scientific aspects of pharmaceutical patents are above my head, but that also applies to the heads of those politicians proposing compulsory licensing of such patents in the current situation.
I just became aware of a disconcerting statement by the chairman of the center-right European People s Party (EPP) group in the European Parliament, Manfred Weber MEP (Christian Social Union, CSU), quoted in a German newspaper article (my translation): If need be, admitted vaccines must also be made by others on the basis of compulsory licensing.
Thursday, January 7, 2021
With VaxGate, Brussels as a metonym for the EU is going through its worst credibility crisis ever, while Brexit is already a success story in one particularly important regard: the UK is outvaccinating the Continent. It s also a fact that British elite universities outperform their continental counterparts in global rankings.
Even EU-friendly mainstream media such as German newsweekly Der Spiegel now feel forced to talk about some of what s going wrong. Spiegel author Michael Sauga today criticizes the Merkel-Macron doctrine (to me, they re simply the Axis of Evil, or even the Axis of Death) that COVID vaccines be both developed and manufactured in Europe in order to become more independent from other economic regions. Just yesterday, the European Commission granted provisional approval to Moderna s mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine, further to a recommendation by the European Medicines Agency. While Moderna s vaccine is already in use in the U.S., the EU clearl
Wednesday, February 3, 2021
This post is a departure from my blog s industry focus that I wouldn t have contemplated if not for the highly unusual circumstances we re facing in the COVID-19 pandemic. The scientific aspects of pharmaceutical patents are above my head, but that also applies to the heads of those politicians proposing compulsory licensing of such patents in the current situation.
I just became aware of a disconcerting statement by the chairman of the center-right European People s Party (EPP) group in the European Parliament, Manfred Weber MEP (Christian Social Union, CSU), quoted in a German newspaper article (my translation): If need be, admitted vaccines must also be made by others on the basis of compulsory licensing.
Wednesday, January 6, 2021
Compared to the EU s COVID VaxGate, Watergate was merely a transgression: two questions of life or death the EU can t answer satisfactorily
I already mentioned in my first post this year about the EU s miserable failure to buy COVID-19 vaccines (as compared to the U.S., Canada, the UK, Israel, and Bahrain), primarily because the French government didn t want the EU to buy too many doses from non-French companies. That scandal now has a far higher profile, with two of the three parties in Merkel s governing coalition already having voiced criticism in public. Many politicians and reporters in other EU member states haven t understood the significance of this yet. Even France itself will suffer far more from the consequences of Macron s worst initiative than it ever stood to gain.