Thread by @doctorow

Remember Howard Dean, the progressive champion who campaigned on equitable health care and other desperately needed policies?

He's dead.

He's been replaced by Howard Dean, the not-a-lobbyist who won't tell anyone what he does for the giant lobbying firm Dentons.

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The old Howard Dean supported single-payer healthcare. The new Dean opposes it.

But then, that new Dean works for Dentons, the largest law firm in the world, alongside Newt Gingrich, as a "senior advisor" to the firm's lobbying arm.

theintercept.com/2016/01/14/how…

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Dentons lobbies for pretty unsavory characters, including Big Health. Dentons owes its world-beating scale to a 2015 merger with the massive Chinese law-firm Dacheng.

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Last month, the new Howard Dean published a remarkable op-ed in Barron's, opposing any measure to permit the world's poorest countries to manufacture generic versions of the covid vaccines they desperately need.

barrons.com/articles/india…

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The arguments Dean fields for this are tired, racist, and manifestly untrue arguments, straight out of Big Pharma's playbook:

I. Poor countries can't make vaccines (reality: poor countries are already among the world's largest pharmaceutical manufacturers) and;

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II. No one will invest in pharma if poor people don't have to pay extortionate royalties in exchange for their lives (reality: pharma doesn't invest in pharma! The pharmaceutical industry is entirely and totally dependent on public R&D spending).

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As @lhfang writes in @theintercept, there's an explanation for this surprising change of heart: "[Dean] reversed his positions on virtually every major progressive health policy issue since moving to work in the world of corporate influence peddling."

theintercept.com/2021/04/08/how…

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Dean insists he's not a lobbyist, but he sure acts like one, trading on his reputation as a "liberal lion" to sell policies to benefit pharma at the expense of the public - like his work with BIO to secure exclusivity for breast-cancer treatments.

theintercept.com/2016/01/21/how…

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This would all be appalling on its own terms - a medical doctor who convinced progressives (including me) to volunteer for his presidential bid, selling out to corporate health-care profiteers, but when it comes to vaccines, this goes beyond selling out. It's genocidal.

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As things stand, 85 of the poorest countries will not have widespread vaccine access until 2023. That's not just a death sentence for the Global South - it's also a chance for the new mutant strains to develop and endanger the whole human race.

eiu.com/n/85-poor-coun…

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The racist lie that brown people can't manufacture their own vaccines is being peddled to maximize profits for some of the cruellest, most profitable, most publicly subsidized companies on Earth - and it's not merely unfair, it's an existential threat to human civilization.

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As @thrasherxy writes in @sciam, the entire vaccine passport debate is a bullshit distraction from the real issue: getting vaccines to every person who can safely take them, in every country on Earth.

scientificamerican.com/article/global…

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As Thrasher writes, today, borders are being used to decide who can get a vaccine. Tomorrow, vaccine passports would punish those unvaccinated people by denying them the right to cross borders. #VaccineEquity is the only just vaccine passport.

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"It is morally reprehensible (not to mention epidemiologically self-defeating) that countries can prevent vaccines from crossing their borders and want their own citizens to be able to cross those borders and travel to countries that are denied vaccines.

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"And then use the threat of infection to keep the people of those unvaccinated countries inside them...A vaccine passport conflates the notions of biology, nationalism and surveillance; it builds on and passively accepts the ethics of passport privilege in general."

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Thrasher cites "Covid-19 vaccine passports will harm sustainable development," in The @bmj_latest, adding, "The idea that one 'needs' to go on vacation or attend an academic conference abroad at this point in the pandemic is morally unjustifiable."

blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/03/30…

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"This is especially true if you are traveling to or from a place where you know others do not have access to vaccines—and you want a special piece of paper proving that you do, which would allow you to cross the border."

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This is the kind of thing you'd expect Dr Howard Dean, the progressive lion who championed single-payer and curbs on drug prices, to write. But he's not. Instead, he's peddling racism and profiteering to serve his corporate paymasters.

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RIP, Dr Dean. You sold your legacy - and our future - for a mess of potage.

Image:
David (modified):
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Howa…

CC BY:
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.…

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If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2021/04/08/how…

eof/