Tag Archives: rights

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.

Patient Privacy

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The Wall Street Journal article headline says it all.

Google Strikes Deal With Hospital Chain to Develop Healthcare Algorithms

Alphabet, through its Google subsidiary, is going to be given access to patient records—patient identification, medical history, drug prescription and use, Internet-connected medical device use and medical device-originated reporting—by a major healthcare provision chain, HCA Healthcare Inc.

Dr Jonathan Perlin, President of HCA’s Clinical Services Group and Chief Medical Officer assures us:

Data are spun off of every patient in real time[.]

In real time. As the patient is hooked into the Internet via an ostensibly privacy-protecting connection.

The claimed goal of this…partnership…is to

develop algorithms to help improve operating efficiency, monitor patients and guide doctors’ decisions, according to the companies.

However,

Google will access data when needed with consent from HCA….

But not necessarily with the consent of the patient, it seems.

Perlin does promise that patient-identifying data will be stripped before HCA passes patient data to Alphabet.

Of course.

Never mind that patient monitoring is tough to do without those data. Never mind that developing algorithms for monitoring patients is tough to do without those data in the mix for, you know, testing.

Alphabet’s penchant for taking user personal data for its own purposes, including monetizing those data for the company’s benefit, is long-standing and well-known. Now the company, with the active collusion of a major hospital chain, is expanding that reach into patient medical data—Alphabet user or not.

Patient privacy be damned. It’s a brave new world.

Race as a Discriminant of Merit

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A Wall Street Journal editorial gets at this as the editors urge the Supreme Court to take up Students for Fair Admissions v Harvard, a case in which Harvard uses race explicitly as a meritorious discriminant for admission.

Harvard personnel actually insist they aren’t discriminating against Americans of Asian descent; they’re merely favoring Americans with black or brown skin. Anyone not chewing the halls’ ivy can see the obvious disingenuousness of that claim; the WSJ‘s editors are entirely correct to push the Court to take up the case.

The larger stakes are whether the Supreme Court will wink as America divides in ways that have proved so destructive in the past.

And

In America today the principle that drove the civil-rights movement—equality for all—is fast giving way to the view that race must be a dominant factor in every decision from college admission to eligibility for a federal farm program to the makeup of corporate boards to who gets priority for a Covid vaccine.

But then the editors wander astray.

It is true that the racial discrimination alleged in Harvard isn’t the same as that of the Jim Crow South. In that era federal government intervention was required to break the state-enforced discrimination against black Americans. Race preferences were rooted then in the false claim of African-American inferiority.
No one thinks Harvard is discriminating because of animosity toward Asian-Americans, much less because it believes they are inferior.

The discrimination is so closely related, though, as to be a conjoined Siamese twin of Jim Crow. Harvard management personnel are setting race-based preference in favor of blacks, rather than against them, precisely because those school managers still believe the claim of African-American inferiority; the school’s management personnel still believe[] [blacks] are inferior.

Whose Money Is It?

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That’s the central question we should be asking ourselves—and we should be electing our government representatives on the basis of the answer.

For example: the Progressive-Democrats in the Maine State legislature are looking to add a 3% income tax “surcharge” on any Maine citizen who makes $200,000 or more per year. The rationalization for this is provided by Progressive-Democrat State Senator Ben Chipman:

If someone is making $1 million a year, they can afford to pay a higher tax rate than somebody who is making $20,000 a year[.]

If they can afford it, they’re somehow obligated to pay it. That imagined obligation can only flow from the Progressive-Democrats’ view that the money we earn isn’t our money, it’s Government’s money, and Government—the men and women in Government—will let us keep what they deem sufficient to our needs.

After all, as a prominent Progressive-Democrat almost said, a short while ago,

If you’ve got [an income], you didn’t [earn] that. Somebody else made that happen.

As that man also said,

There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me, because they want to give something back.

What the Progressive-Democrat chose to misconstrue, though—what Progressive-Democrats as a group choose to misconstrue—is that “give back” means “Government take back.”

Because Government, according to Progressive-Democrats, isn’t really taking back; Government is keeping and giving back a portion of what it doesn’t believe is ours to begin with.

Someone who is wealthier than me is somehow obligated to pay more than me for the same good, service, benefit I’m getting? I pay $X for a car or a meal out but my neighbor, who has a higher income than me, should have to pay $X++ for that same car or meal out? Just because he can afford to pay $X++?

How does that work, exactly? Where is the morality in that? Where is the equality in that? Where is the Progressive-Democrats’ precious equity in that?

From Luke 12:48 (King James Version):

For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more.

Absolutely. Hence the desire of those who want to give something back.

But that’s the thing. The obligation is levied by God on us as individuals, not by Government on us as a collection of citizens, and it’s an obligation for each of us to give according to our chosen methods and beneficiaries (and by extension, to choose wisely), not an authorization for Government to take according to Government men’s choices (and by extension, to be subject to their arbitrariness).

Tim Tebow and Colin Kaepernick

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Or, in the eyes of some sports commentators, it’s Tim Tebow vs Colin Kaepernick. Because white privilege.

I don’t ordinarily comment on sports in this blog, but this item isn’t about sports. It’s about respect and patriotism.

The proximate subject and source of commentators’—the personage at the link isn’t alone—manufactured angst is that, after a number of years, Tim Tebow has signed with an NFL football team to try to earn a slot on the roster for the coming season, while Colin Kaepernick has sat out for a similar number of years, unable to get a contract.

However.

When Tebow takes a knee, it’s to give thanks for a successful play and a successful game. And to give thanks even after an unsuccessful game.

Kaepernick, on the other hand, takes knees in utter, deliberate disrespect for our national anthem, our national flag, and in deep insult to all the generations of American soldiers who’ve fought, been killed, been maimed fighting for everything our anthem and our flag symbolize—including Kaepernick’s right to be an insulting ass.

And Kaepernick does this while oh so piously insisting that he’s protesting social injustice and police brutality, instead of going into the neighborhoods and working, concretely, for more and better opportunities for the locals and working with the police to improve their neighborhood performance.

Oh, and Kaepernick did get a specially arranged tryout—and walked away from it at the last minute over another of his made-up beefs.