t
he Intercept’s Lee Fang dropped the latest Twitter Files on Monday, which showed that in addition to the federal government’s pressuring Twitter to shape content regarding Covid vaccine policy and efficacy. “The push,” Fang reports, “included direct pressure from Pfizer partner BioNTech to censor activists demanding low-cost generic vaccines for low-income countries.”
The Biden administration made a major effort to purchase name-brand vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna to distribute to poor countries. The global donation of Covid vaccines from the US has been in excess of 1 billion doses.
Early on, however, the consensus was that since Covid was a global emergency, there should be something of a global solution, Fang reports, saying that “there was a push to make the solution equitable: an international partnership to share ideas, technology, new forms of medicine to rapidly solve this crisis.”
It was the pharmaceutical companies that “saw the crisis as an opportunity for unprecedented profit,” and in service to that agenda, they took part in a “massive lobbying blitz to crush any effort to share patents/IP for new covid-related medicine, including therapeutics and vaccines.”
Big pharma wanted to squash the competition, and in addition to using their influence with government to prevent other nations from “attempting to violate patent rights and create generic low-cost” treatment for Covid, they “put direct pressure on social media.”
