Thread by @doctorow

The world is experiencing a "pandemic of the unvaccinated," but the largest pool unvaccinated people isn't to be found among vaccine deniers of the rich world.

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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/2021/12/07/sol…

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Rather, these vulnerable people - whose infections might spawn new, vaccine-bypassing, more-lethal variants - are the 2.5b people in the world's 125 poorest countries, where vaccines are not widely available and the vaccination rate is 2.6%.

doctorow.medium.com/pandemic-of-th…

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The pharma lobbyists who have blocked a WTO waiver are the true vaccine deniers.

They are literally denying vaccines to billions of people, but also implicitly denying that constitutes an existential risk to all of us, as unvaccinated nations offer fertile breeding grounds for new, scarier variants.

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Big Pharma - and its shills, like Howard Dean - has based this vaccine denial on two big lies:

I. That vaccine factories take too long to build to be of use. Moderna privately admits that new factories could have been built in 3-4 months.

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II. That poor brown people are too primitive to make their own vaccines. The world's largest vaccine factories are in the Global South.

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The latest delaying tactic? Insisting that any WTO vaccine waiver should exclude trade secrets - the know-how necessary to turn patents and scientific papers into vaccine production:

osborneclarke.com/insights/trade…

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It's a maneuver only an IP lawyer could love.

It takes a lot of work to make an issue as clear-cut and urgent as vaccine equity into a controversy. @TheKaranMenon manages to lay out the whole case in 95 seconds in a Tiktok video:

https://twitter.com/TheKaranMenon/status/1466912293380231168

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You could not ask for a clearer, more forceful statement of the plain case for letting the poorest people in the world make their own vaccines. Watching this video might just be the best use of 95 seconds you make all day.

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