Daily Archives: 1 June 2021

Wuhan Virus Vaccines and Intellectual Property

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President Joe Biden (D) is looking at “waiving” the patents held by American pharmaceutical companies—Pfizer and Moderna—that  developed the vaccines that have been so effective against the Peoples Republic of China-released Wuhan Virus.

Leave aside the uselessness of waiving these patent rights because the vaccines require to much, too varied, too complex equipment to be manufacturable just on the basis of the vaccines’ technologies being made freeware in the public arena.

Leave aside, too, that these companies—and others beyond American jurisdiction that have developed other Wuhan Virus vaccines—already are delivering doses virtually at cost to the poorer nations.

Biden’s proposal [is] to temporarily waive their patents, but that’s completely disingenuous. An intellectual property once lost is lost forever—there is nothing temporary about such a waiver except in the narrowest, most legalist, sense.

The larger problem is the: with that government-mandated loss will go any incentive a company might have to spend the billions of dollars it takes to develop future such things, especially vaccines, since a company can have no confidence Government might decide it “needs” to give the new patents away also.

There will be very little vaccine development in the United States after Biden goes through with this.

This will not be over quickly. We will not enjoy this.

Patty-Cake

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President Joe Biden (D) has an Executive Order out that, among other things, asks private industry pretty please to adapt to the continuously changing threat environment, ensure its products are built and operate securely, and partner with the Federal Government to foster a more secure cyberspace.

Clarion Intelligence Network Director Ryan Mauro has another idea, sort of.

Make no mistake about it, a defensive strategy towards the cyber threat is not going to work. There’s going to have to be an offensive strategy.

But he doesn’t go far enough, either.

It’s time for the US to do things like having its own Wikileaks, so that when Putin does something, guess what appears on the internet? A bunch of his own secrets, showing how corrupt he is—that will deter them.

No. That’s a mouse remonstrating with a hawk. The mouse insists the hawk’s ways are wrong. The hawk insists the mouse is lunch.

We need to make a serious response—rather, a serious collection of responses—to a cyber attack, which Mauro does correctly characterize as no difference, when you commit an attack, whether using a bomb or cyber strike.

No, our offensive response must be a sharp escalation—done faster than the attacker can respond—and across a broad spectrum. Our response must include a prompt cyber response that includes those secrets being exposed, but that also simultaneously shuts off electrical grids and penetrates and corrupts attacker national databases. Our response also longer-term penalties, even if they take some time to produce effect: immediately emplaced economic bars against government officials, oligarchs and their enterprises, and governments of the attacking nation or of the nation hosting the attackers. The response must continue: location of the equipment used to originate the cyber attack and the corruption of that equipment with malware (of which there is much on the dark net; no need to reveal our own malware capabilities).

The only real conundrum here is that our response must not be so all-out that it gives away our full capabilities before we’re in an actual war.