I am genuinely disturbed by this. But, I’m not sure what’s going on, really, because the news cameras are turning their eyes away from the topic.

Here’s where we start, an article in Slate: [slate] Slate is hardly an establishment mouthpiece like the New York Times, but suddenly they’re coming over all aligned with the geopolitics of the intelligence state:

North Korea Reportedly Tried to Hack Pfizer Servers to Steal Coronavirus Vaccine

For starters, that’s an asinine headline. You cannot steal a vaccine via a computer. What you can do is steal information about the production of a vaccine; you still have to do the hard work of developing the large-scale manufacture of millions of doses, and the small-scale production of the genetic sequences that comprise the vaccine’s payload. Of course stealing some documentation from someone’s computer is going to be helpful, because it prunes your researchers’ going down blind alleys and provides a clear road-map to producing the vaccine, but ultimately the question of whether it can be produced at all boils down to the technological maturity of your biomed industry. That’s not something that can be stolen, it has to be built. Built painfully.

North Korea quickly closed its border with China, its primary trading partner, shortly after the virus outbreak there began, and its leader Kim Jong-un has maintained that the isolated country is coronavirus-free. It’s hard to imagine any country in the world has actually been untouched by the pandemic, but considering North Korea’s current makeup as a nation-sized prison camp, who knows? Kim, as expected, is taking pandemic propaganda very, very seriously. When the South Korean foreign minister suggested that it was “hard to believe” the North didn’t have the virus, Kim responded in a way that only makes sense in a totally over-the-top North Korean propaganda kind of way. “We will never forget her words and she might have to pay dearly for it,” Kim replied.

Other than the accusation (carried forward allegedly by South Korean intelligence) of the hacking attempt, there is remarkably little meat in the article. I’ll go so far as to suggest that Slate might have saved itself a few kilobytes by not publishing it, at all.

North Korea, along with the usual suspects of Russia and China, have all been accused of trying to swipe vaccine data from pharmaceutical companies, researchers, and others. “Although it claims to be free of the virus, North Korea has requested coronavirus vaccines and is set to receive nearly two million doses of the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine, according to the Gavi Alliance, part of the United Nations-backed Covax effort which aims to deliver vaccines to the world’s most vulnerable people,” the Washington Post reports. “The statement by South Korean officials is the latest in a string of accusations against North Korean hackers for attempting to steal vaccine technology, highlighting Pyongyang’s ongoing campaign to obtain sensitive information through nefarious means and its growing cyber capabilities.”

Oh, so they’re trying to steal something they already bought? What’s irrational about that? Like in the US, their political leaders will all get shots and everyone else can just sit around and wait for the establishment to “trickle down” the vaccine. The US will complain about the North Korean leadership doing they do: they take care of themselves and then worry about how to translate access to the vaccine into political advantage. There: I said it – the unsayable. The US is going to take care of its citizens (implicitly, the message to “illegal immigrants” is “you can die, so long as you die working.” The Biden administration, notably, has not reined in or scaled back ICE and you can bet that, by the time the vaccine has percolated down the wealth-gradient so it’s being offered to hourly workers, republican states will start requiring state-issued ID as a prerequisite for getting the shot. Just watch, around June/July.

Meanwhile, the ignorant pieces of shit in Washington have “fumbled” an opportunity, according to the New York Times: [nyt]

Despite warnings, American and European officials gave up leverage that could have guaranteed access for billions of people. That risks prolonging the pandemic.

 

Either way, it implies that US and EU officials were going to take political advantage of the pandemic – the New York Times is questioning whether those decisions are the right ones, whether they will provide the right “leverage.” Because talking about “leverage” sounds much less monstrous than “taking political advantage of the pandemic.”

In the coming days, a patent will finally be issued on a five-year-old invention, a feat of molecular engineering that is at the heart of at least five major Covid-19 vaccines. And the United States government will control that patent.

The new patent presents an opportunity – and some argue the last best chance – to exact leverage over the drug companies producing the vaccines and pressure them to expand access to less affluent countries.

The question is whether the government will do anything at all.

To ask a question like that is to answer it: the government won’t do anything because doing anything would run contrary to the interests of the drug companies and would puncture the big lie of the patent system, namely that it’s anything but arbitrary “money for the sake of money” service to capitalism.

The rapid development of Covid-19 vaccines, achieved at record speed and financed by massive public funding in the United States, the European Union and Britain, represents a great triumph of the pandemic. Governments partnered with drugmakers, pouring in billions of dollars to procure raw materials, finance clinical trials and retrofit factories. Billions more were committed to buy the finished product.

But this Western success has created stark inequity. Residents of wealthy and middle-income countries have received about 90 percent of the nearly 400 million vaccines delivered so far. Under current projections, many of the rest will have to wait years.

Meanwhile, let’s wring our hands about those sneaky North Koreans who are trying to “steal the recipe” for the vaccine:

A growing chorus of health officials and advocacy groups worldwide are calling for Western governments to use aggressive powers – most of them rarely or never used before – to force companies to publish vaccine recipes, share their know-how and ramp up manufacturing. Public health advocates have pleaded for help, including asking the Biden administration to use its patent to push for broader vaccine access.

It’s the usual New York Times attempt to sneak a policy recommendation across in its reporting: “a growing chorus of health officials and advocacy groups”

Governments have resisted. By partnering with drug companies, Western leaders bought their way to the front of the line. But they also ignored years of warnings – and explicit calls from the World Health Organization – to include contract language that would have guaranteed doses for poor countries or encouraged companies to share their knowledge and the patents they control.

“It was like a run on toilet paper. Everybody was like, ‘Get out of my way. I’m gonna get that last package of Charmin,’” said Gregg Gonsalves, a Yale epidemiologist. “We just ran for the doses.”

What do you expect, when a white supremacist apartheid state invests heavily in countering a pandemic? Guess who’s going to get the shots. Guess who’s not going to get the shots. Meanwhile, within the US, the wealthy have taken advantage of their relative mobility and special medical arrangements that guarantee personal attention to get to the front of the line for shots. I sympathize: ultimately we are all cowards in the face of something like COVID-19, and will probably pull every string that we can. In my case, I admit that being overweight turned out to be a less-bad thing than I expected: obese people get to the head of the line in Pennsylvania.

Under Trump, we could be sure that the vaccine (and antibody treatments) were going to be disproportionately applied, watching the President of the United States get an expensive, rare, treatment publicly – a treatment that he explicitly discouraged his followers from pursuing – basically, setting the tone for the entire exercise thereafter. Nobody is talking about how the shots are being distributed based on your driver’s license (in Pennsylvania, at least) – something an “illegal immigrant” would not have. Nobody is talking about how the shots (in Pennsylvania, at least) might require driving 2+ hours each direction, taking a day off work that some people – the people who need the shots the most – cannot afford to do. There has been some reporting about the sad fact that black people, in the US, are having more trouble getting vaccines than white people. But that same dynamic is playing out internationally.

The tone of reporting about Russia’s SPUTNIK-5 vaccine was amazement: those crazy medieval Russians were able to make an advanced vaccine?! How did this happen? They must have spied on someone, just like they did in the nuclear arms race. Remember: we are simultaneously supposed to think of them as backward, technologically, yet threateningly capable of producing hypersonic delivery systems for the nuclear warheads they somehow managed to produce. The same has been playing out in India: they have locally-developed vaccines, which apparently work just fine, except that the European and American companies that were expecting to reap billions of dollars of profits have watched that balloon pop. It is unquestionable that the US and European drug manufacturers are going to make a hellacious amount of profit from this disaster – the question is: is hellacious profit enough? If I know my capitalists, it’s not, because there is no “enough” in “capitalism” or something.

“It was U.S.-centric. It wasn’t anti-global.” said Moncef Slaoui, who was the chief scientific adviser for Operation Warp Speed, a Trump administration program that funded the search for vaccines in the United States. “Everybody was in agreement that vaccine doses, once the U.S. is served, will go elsewhere.”

I suppose it makes sense: the purpose of government is the common defense and common good; if there’s any reason for the US Government (other than building empires and buying F-35s) it would be to move efforts against pandemics. You know, like the government got caught completely flat-footed on? But I suppose we should assume that the US will, first and foremost, take care of its golf-playing elite and instagram influencers, then maybe send some vaccines to the rich and powerful in Mexico, too. Because, if we don’t, the Russians will. Or the Chinese, or the Indians, or someone else that will erode US power. Remember: while the US media is busy keeping scorecards of how many of which of the three big US-led vaccine efforts are going into arms, the rest of the world is serving as a massive test-cadre for the Russian, Chinese, and Indian vaccines. It’s a triumph for science but it’s also a triumph for petty, stupid nationalism.

I have written about this before and won’t belabor the point yet again, but this is a dry-run for how humanity is going to respond to the climate catastrophe: the rich people will jam the lifeboats just like they did on the Titanic and nobody even talked about (or gave a shit about) the people in steerage, less than 1/3 of whom survived. Once the crisis has broken along lines of wealth/class then it will break across nationalism’s imaginary boundaries and the “global south” – i.e.: former colonies – will get fucked. Again. Like they are getting fucked by COVID-19. While the US is arguing about how long the lines are at the shot stations, the fact is that, at a national policy level, the US is worried about “leverage.”

CNN reports with some shock that: [cnn]

“To reduce the risks of escalation, we reached out to the North Korean government through several channels starting in mid-February, including in New York,” the official said. “To date, we have not received any response from Pyongyang. This follows over a year without active dialogue with North Korea, despite multiple attempts by the US to engage.”

The official did not provide further details of what the outreach entailed but noted the administration has been conducting its interagency review of the United States’ policy towards North Korea, “including evaluation of all available options to address the increasing threat posed by North Korea to its neighbors and the broader international community.”

“To reduce the risks of escalation, we reached out to the North Korean government through several channels starting in mid-February, including in New York,”

That’s code for: “we wanted to resume brow-beating the North Koreans about their nuclear weapons and ballistic missile systems, and they didn’t want to submit themselves to another round of that.” Remember how it went with Trump: he tried to do a little personal diplomacy, and the national security establishment made him look like an idiot by morphing “let’s talk to North Korea” into “discussions about denuclearizing” – something the North Koreans had never put on the table as an option, except in the snarky sense of “we’ll denuclearize when the US does.”

I’m sure the North Korean elite have all gotten their shots, just like US Congress did, by jumping to the head of the line because they’re so all-fired important. (Meanwhile, they’ll pose about not wearing masks, etc., but now they probably have immunity) But circle back to the original point of this: the “advanced” governments of the world want to control who gets the vaccine and some of the establishment feel that there’s an opportunity a’wasting: an opportunity to decide who gets vaccines and who doesn’t. Local efforts like the Russian, Chinese, and Indian vaccines are a wrench in the gears. The Indian vaccine, for example, is a traditional vaccine – dead virus injected to create immunity – so it’s not even covered under the various patents governing the US/European vaccines.

NYT again:

Russia and China, meanwhile, have promised to fill the void as part of their vaccine diplomacy. The Gamaleya Institute in Moscow, for example, has entered into partnerships with producers from Kazakhstan to South Korea, according to data from Airfinity, a science analytics company, and UNICEF. Chinese vaccine makers have reached similar deals in the United Arab Emirates, Brazil and Indonesia.

These arrangements can be seen as an “equal and opposite reaction” to the US/European implicit attempt to hog all of the vaccines until we don’t need them anymore, and can play politics with who gets the hand-me-downs. Which is utterly, as usual, unconscionable because the COVID-19 virus doesn’t give a shit about all of that stuff. And, we foolish humans have now demonstrated that it’s possible to turn a novel pandemic virus into an endemic virus by giving it a billion reservoirs in which to mutate. The consequences of politicizing this, as the US has at every level will be millions of deaths for the rest of humanity’s tenure on Earth.

BBC: