Ollie wrote:It's not about how many vaccine doses the rich countries will deign to donate to poorer nations, it's about waiving the patents so the rich countries don't get to decide whether and how many the poorer nations get.
I completely agree with you.
That's why I was annoyed at AZ getting all the flak, when they - along with Johnson & Johnson - pledged to be "not for profit" on their vaccine, while Pfizer and Moderna flatly refused to do the same.
Particularly because, by the evidence, there's barely any difference between AZ and Pfizer's blood clot numbers - and all the vaccines reduce the chance of blood clots significantly.
Here's the BMJ's infographic that shows the actual numbers on various types of blood clots:
As you can see, in every single case, vaccination with AZ (the violet-y purple) and with Pfizer (orange) reduce - in some cases, very substantially reduce - the chances of blood clots, in comparison to natural infection (the pinky purple).
There's very little difference - just "margin or error" stuff - between AZ's results and Pfizer's results, as you can see. Pfizer is mostly slightly better - though AZ has better numbers on Ischaemic Strokes and "other" - but there's really fuck all of significance between them. You can see that, for most of these, bar the top two listed, you could not get a hair between them (and that's, like, "margin of error" stuff - redo the numbers again and they could easily swap places).
So, the headline "vaccines cause blood clots" is simply utter bullshit. Covid - or, perhaps more precisely, the immune response to it (or the vaccines, which are simulating the virus) - causes blood clots.
ALL the vaccines reduce the chance of that happening (in many cases, very substantially so).
And there's simply nothing here in these figures to suggest you should ban AZ, while happily carrying on Pfizer jabs. There's barely anything between them, so how the hell can any of these
political bans on AZ be justified by the evidence? They absolutely can't.
But the way all the EU countries lined up to club AZ on the head - and other nations like the UK and the US have also "gone cold" on AZ because of the adverse publicity - while no-one said a single sodding thing about Pfizer at any point?
I was suspicious as hell of this.
The company that refuses to do this "not for profit". The company that, you know, is selling its jabs at $14 (US price) to $15 (EU price) per shot, where AZ's charging $2.15 to $5 per shot (and the numbers have leaked, the costs of production are broadly similar, Pfizer's just adding a big profit margin on top). This is the company escaping all criticism as if utterly perfect, while AZ is slurred and banned all over the place - for what we can see is basically no real difference in results, and
ALL vaccines reduce the chance of blood clots.
NONE of them are causing it - Covid is causing the blood clots and the vaccines reduce the chance, but they don't, unfortunately, reduce that chance to zero.
That's the actual conclusion from real figures, supplied by actual doctors.
The vaccines - all of them - are vastly better than taking your chances with Covid itself. From actual real world data. And, come on, in the climate we've been living in, with the surges we've seen, if you're not getting the vaccine then you're likely going to eventually get Covid (because, yes, there is the idea that you could not get any vaccine and avoid Covid too, then your chances of blood clots are zero - but that's not reality and that's not sensible, is it? Because you're probably not going to avoid Covid, and then you've just made your chances significantly worse. Besides the fact that, you know, Covid also kills through pneumonia and cripples people for long periods of time with Long Covid and can cause permanent damage, even to survivors, on top of the blood clot chance as well). Because, heck, even with the vaccines, we're getting "breakthrough" infections on Delta, and Omicron seems to give far less shits about vaccine immunity.
And there's even some proof, from a Channel 4 investigation, that Pfizer has actually been paying experts to lie about Astrazeneca's jab:
https://www.wionews.com/world/investiga ... jab-435463
This isn't a "smoking gun" over the bullshit with AZ and the EU, unfortunately - it's a different incident - but they were paying experts to bullshit that AZ's jab has possible cancer links. Oh, yes, they sunk exactly that low.
Pfizer are also forcing governments - such as the UK government - to sign secrecy clauses, to protect their sales numbers and prices from public scrutiny, before they'll supply jabs (as the UK did fuck up and published a "redacted" document that, oops, didn't redact the numbers properly, so the government itself accidentally leaked all the numbers for each of the jabs last Summer).
They're expected to make revenues of £36 billion on their jab. The estimate on AstraZeneca is about $2-3 billion. And that's revenue, not profits, so if you deduct costs (which, as I say, have leaked and are broadly the same for all the jabs), then AZ is keeping to its pledge that it's not trying to profiteer, while Pfizer are pointing at us all and laughing.
Pfizer are cunts. They're blatantly profiteering - and even making governments sign "secrecy clauses" to hide this fact from general public view. The evidence completely exonerates AZ's jab. The bans were political bullshit, from a company that's already been caught paying experts to lie about AZ already.
So, you know, don't remotely get me wrong here. I 100% fully agree with you.
But, well, realism. We can say "drop the patents" all we like, but it's never going to happen. Pfizer's got $36 billion in the bank to make sure that it's never going to happen.
That's what should happen. But, being realistic, it's not going to happen and so, you know, I was offering the "next best" in light of this. Pfizer's never going to drop its profiteering stranglehold, so the "next best" is that rich nations help out poorer ones. Because that, with some political pressure, could happen.
"Words ought to be a little wild - for they are assaults of thought on the unthinking."
- John Maynard Keynes
