A key talking point against the free sharing of vaccine recipes was premised on a false assertion.

In response to October 2020 proposal from India and South Africa that the World Trade Organization suspend enforcement of key patent rules so that cheaper, generic versions of Covid-19 treatments and vaccines can get to more people more quickly, the proposal is referred to as a TRIPS waiver, a reference to the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, Pfizer and Moderna, both of which produce mRNA vaccines, insisted how intellectual property incentivizes creativity, and rewards those who save lives. Sharing vaccine recipes, they claimed was not the panacea because much of the world lacks the facilities and capacity to produce vaccines in a safe and timely manner. Even if we got rid of all intellectual property rules tomorrow, this would do little to boost immediate global vaccine supply.

Big Pharma warned of the laborious and time-intensive process of developing the ability to produce mRNA vaccines specifically. ​

“There is no idle mRNA manufacturing capacity in the world. This is a new technology, you cannot go hire people who know how to make mRNA—those people don’t exist,” Stéphane Bancel, chief executive of Moderna, said in May.

 ​”Only a few facilities in the world perform some of the critical steps needed to manufacture mRNA vaccines,” industry trade group PhRMA, which represents Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson, asserted in March.

It turns out not to be true. 

On October 22, the New York Times ran a story titled, ​”Here’s Why Developing Countries Can Make mRNA Covid Vaccines”.

NYT identified 10 different facilities in India, Brazil, Thailand, South Africa, Argentina and Indonesia that are strong candidates for producing mRNA vaccines. ​

“The key criteria include existing facilities, human capital, the regulatory system for medicines and the political and economic climate,” writes journalist Stephanie Nolen. Some of the facilities are already producing other vaccines, or testing or making their own mRNA vaccines. In other words, Global South countries could absolutely start producing Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, if the companies would only tell them how. 

 Indonesia’s health minister, Budi Gunadi Sadikin, said at a World Health Organization event that the country has the capacity to ​”upscale our vaccine productions to meet regional and global demand.” 

“Moderna’s former director of chemistry estimates that modern factories could start manufacturing mRNA vaccines within a few months if sufficient know-how is transferred,” Oxfam noted.

According to recent research by Doctors Without Borders, Africa-based manufacturers are currently prepared to make mRNA vaccines if provided access to the necessary production information.

 The pharmaceutical industry was not driven by altruistic motives: the desire to protect innovation and research, and ensure safe and responsible vaccine production. Instead, they sought to protect pharmaceutical monopolies and their profits.  The drug industry has shown it would rather build its own facilities from scratch—like the BioNTech facilities in Rwanda and Senegal, which won’t even start construction until mid-2022—than give Global South countries the ability to produce vaccines themselves. 

“It’s clear that Pfizer and Moderna cannot supply enough vaccines to make sure everyone on the planet has access, so they must figure out a way to share the technology and know-how,” Robbie Silverman, Oxfam America’s senior manager for private sector engagement, said in a statement. “Pfizer’s and Moderna’s inability to produce enough vaccines threatens global public health and the world economy—as long-term investors, we urge these companies to take immediate action to save lives.”

“Continued vaccine inequality will not only cause more deaths and suffering around the world, it will also devastate our global economy, possibly to the tune of trillions of dollars,” Silverman added. “While a few are profiting handsomely, investors recognize the dangers of vaccine apartheid and are seeking to hold these companies accountable.”

In its Moderna shareholder resolution, Oxfam urged the corporation to share its “intellectual property and technical knowledge (‘know-how’) to facilitate the production of Covid-19 vaccine doses by additional qualified manufacturers located in low- and middle-income countries.”

“Independent estimates indicate that Moderna will miss its 2021 production target of one billion doses by 33%,” the document reads. “To ensure equitable access, Moderna should transfer the intellectual property and know-how associated with its vaccines to allow manufacture in low- and middle-income countries. Pressure, including by the U.S. government, is intensifying on Moderna to make such transfers.”

Taken from here

Opinion | Big Pharma Lies About Vaccine Patents to Protect Profits | Sarah Lazare (commondreams.org)

‘Unprecedented’ Shareholder Resolutions Call on Pfizer, Moderna to Share Vaccine Tech (commondreams.org)

  Bernie Sanders described a new proposal for the Democrats’ reduced $1.75 spending bill as “beyond unacceptable.”

 A new addition to the proposed budget would repeal the $10,000 cap on federal deductions for state and local taxes, a move that has long been championed by some Democratic lawmakers, who believe the Trump-era law unfairly affected people in high-tax blue states like New Jersey and California.

It had a particular impact on people with properties in more than one state, who were unable to deduct large state tax obligations from their federal tax bill.

One analysis found could end up delivering a huge tax cut to the wealthiest Americans.

The analysis by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget projected that a repeal of the cap could end up costing the federal government far more than any proposed higher taxes on the wealthy and would result in a $30 billion net direct tax cut for the wealthiest 5% of Americans.

‘Beyond unacceptable’: Bernie Sanders slams Democrats’ $1.75 trillion spending package after analysis said it would cut taxes for the rich (yahoo.com)

The desire to do something about climate change and global warming should not blind us to whether proposed solutions are actually feasible, or might generate unintended consequences.

 Carbon offsetting has been criticised by Tom Goldtooth, a prominent activist within the Indigenous movement, as “part of a system that privatizes the air that we breathe”.

Carbon offsets are a set of schemes that allows companies, but also individuals, to buy credits from different environmental projects – such as tree-planting, or solar and wind farms – to substitute for their own carbon footprints. These schemes can often involve large carbon sinks, such as tropical rainforests, in developing countries.

Tom Goldtooth, executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network, explained “It allows polluters to buy and sell permits to pollute instead of cutting emissions at the source. It lets governments and corporations pretend they are doing something about climate change, when they are not.” He went on to say, “In our traditional knowledge we know that we cannot own the sky, we cannot trade Mother Earth in a market system.”

Mr Goldtooth, who is Diné and Dakota, has organized around Indigenous issues for the past 40 years. He won the 2015 Gandhi Award and 2016 John Muir Award for his decades of defending Indigenous rights to a healthy environment and combatting fossil fuel projects. He travelled to Glasgow’s COP26 with a delegation representing 15 different Indigenous Nations from Canada, the US including Alaska and Brazil. Mr Goldtooth has attended Cop summits for two decades and says Indigenous peoples still remain at the fringes.

“We’re here and we still don’t have a seat at the table,” he said. “In some areas [of the venue] we don’t have access, and they’re very critical in terms of negotiations. So we’re forced to try to grab people in the hallways.”

Indigenous protesters gathered outside the main turnstiles into the Cop26 venue. The group held up copies of the Financial Times, where they had secured a full-page ad that read: “Carbon offsetting is tearing us apart.”

“We need real reduction, and to keep fossil fuels in the ground,” Mr Goldtooth said. “Carbon offsetting perpetuates the theft of Indigenous people’s land and our territories. Our brothers and sisters have been protecting their lands and forests for thousands of years. Carbon offsets are a new form of colonialism.”

Mr Goldtooth said that the focus on net-zero emissions was “false and clearly dangerous” compared to absolute zero emissions.

“It’s very vague. it hasn’t been clearly defined. It’s got too much risk to it,” he said. He said national governments and corporations continue to push “false solutions” such as carbon capture and storage and solar engineering. “These technical fixes violate the natural laws of the atmosphere, of the sky, of the Mother Earth, all that delicate, harmonious structure,” he said.

He compared the world, particularly the industrialized countries in the North, to a drug addict, and said they were “addicted to the combustion of fossil fuels”.

“I think the world is addicted to energy. It can’t wean itself from this addiction to consumption and also the creation of waste. My fear is that they will continue to burn to the end of the earth,” he added.

“I was hopeful that maybe with this Democratic president [Biden], we might be able to get some things going for ourselves as Indigenous peoples, economically as well,” Mr Goldtooth said. “Around climate policy, I was hoping for something better. He made so many promises on his road to presidency that he was going to tackle climate change and end fossil fuel investments on public lands. He’s lying. He said that he was going to recognize Indigenous rights [but] he’s continued to perpetuate a legacy of broken treaties. Many members of our network that are here don’t trust this person.”

Cop26: Carbon offsetting ‘a new form of colonialism,’ says Indigenous leader | The Independent

The Socialist Party has secured an official pitch for a street stall at Royal Exchange Square, right in the heart of Glasgow City Centre, during the COP26 climate summit. 

The stall will be up and running from Monday until Wednesday next week, from 10am until 5pm each day. 

 Comrades are travelling from across the UK in order to help spread the party case for socialism to explain the root cause of the environmental mess we find ourselves in.

 ExxonMobil and Chevron as well as American Petroleum Institute are the world’s most obstructive organisations when it comes to governments setting climate policies, according to research by lobbying experts at the thinktank InfluenceMap. 

 It concluded that companies were manipulating governments to take “incredibly dangerous paths” in their approach to climate action, using  the “prolific and highly sophisticated” lobbying ploys.

Oil giants have mounted “intense resistance” to Joe Biden’s green agenda, according to the report, as the US president’s administration attempted to shift the country away from fossil fuels. The report also said corporate lobbying tactics in part explained why regulators in some countries such as Australia have struggled to build support for more ambitious climate policy in the lead-up to Cop26 and were increasingly viewed as “a road block in global negotiations”.

Ed Collins, a director at InfluenceMap, said “The corporate playbook for holding back climate policy has come a long way from science denialism but it is every bit as damaging. What we are seeing is not limited to efforts to undermine regulations directly. It also involves prolific and highly sophisticated narrative capture techniques, leading governments down incredibly dangerous paths.”

US oil giants top list of lobby offenders holding back climate action | ExxonMobil | The Guardian

 The latest audio uploads –

Who will pay for Social Care? – Adam Buick, 8th October 2021

Climate activists say it is all a smoke-screen. 

Several major economies still have yet to set a date for ending their dependence on the fuel, including the United States, China, India and Japan.

 The promises vary and some pledges came with important caveats, 

Some have pledged to quit coal completely at a future date, while others say they’ll stop building new plants, and even more, including China, are talking about just stopping the financing of new coal plants abroad.

United States, Canada, Denmark and several other nations signed a different pledge to “prioritize” funding clean energy over fossil fuel projects abroad, but not completely ruling out financial support for coal-fired power plants,

Indonesia requested additional aid before committing to bringing its deadline forward to the 2040s. South Africa will get billions of dollars to compensate it if the money is forthcoming, that is. 

Poland, the second-biggest user of coal in Europe, appeared to backtrack in an apparent U-turn on any ambitious new commitments within hours of the announcement.

“Energy security and the assurances of jobs is a priority for us,” Anna Moskwa, Poland’s minister for climate and environment, said in a tweet, citing the government’s existing plan which “provides for a departure from hard coal by 2049.” Earlier in the day, it had seemed that Poland might bring that deadline forward by at least a decade. 

“Moskwa has underscored that her government cannot be trusted to sign a postcard, let alone a responsible climate pledge,” said Kathrin Gutmann, campaign director of the group Europe Beyond Coal.

Countries pledge to cut heavily polluting coal, with caveats (apnews.com)

 Another “breakthrough” at Cop26. This time it is about a reduction in the use of coal. Many major coal users including Poland, Vietnam and Chile are committing to shift away from the fossil fuel, in pledges made at the climate summit.

Despite Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo signing the agreement to end deforestation by 2030 deal, its Environment Minister Siti Nurbaya Bakar said development remained Indonesia’s top priority. She said the authorities could not “promise what we can’t do” and went on to say forcing Indonesia to commit to zero deforestation by 2030 was “clearly inappropriate and unfair”, signalling that the country may not abide by it.

“The massive development of President Jokowi’s era must not stop in the name of carbon emissions or in the name of deforestation,” she said, referring to Mr Widodo by his nickname. “Indonesia’s natural wealth, including forests, must be managed for its use according to sustainable principles, besides being fair,” she said.