Hi
Shouldn’t vaccine science be treated like top-secret intelligence? With countries competing to outdo each other/hacking each other to bring out the first viable Covid-19 vaccine,. why is vaccine info not released more discretely by Western nations. You can bet China is holding back on its advances.
If the US develops a vaccine and China steals it, it only harms the company making the vaccine (plain theft). That would not harm national security.
Pretty sure that most scientists are working for the embetterment of humanity as a whole, not some bullshit political game. That’s the job of shitty politicians.
But ok, sure, let’s keep it a secret…because why? Because you think china is keeping it a secret? How fucking petty is that? You’d let millions die just because they would?
Why on earth? We WANT all potential victims/carriers of an extremely contagious and dangerous disease to get inoculated against it, when/if a vaccine is available, as fast as possible.
Sure, companies who might profit from a vaccine want to protect their intellectual property, and cyberspying can interfere with the crucial activities of research institutions, so spying, hacking and stealing are still Bad Things.
But in the long run, what people overwhelmingly want is vaccines for everybody, as fast as possible. And researchers want to be able to communicate with other researchers. I don’t think a movement to impose military-style security classifications on vaccine research data would be well received.
Because medicine isn’t a competition and viruses don’t care what citizenship you hold?
How would this benefit the West?
Just curious could research on vaccines potentially be used for something bad like an aspect of biological weapons or something, or engineering a bio weapon for which a vaccine could not be made?
It’s not a competition to see which country will have the most deaths.
If vaccines are being used for financial gain/personal profit OR for military (warfare) intent, then yes.
If vaccines are being used for the betterment of humanity and global humanitarianism, then no. We should be working together.
On the contrary, vaccine science should be disseminated as widely as possible, as the shared information may speed vaccine development elsewhere. It doesn’t matter who crosses the line first, we all win.
I think it’s only in anti-vax ravings that I ever hear about vaccines being some huge money-making enterprise.
It should be treated like proprietary IP if it is proprietary. That’s a far cry from TS intelligence. SCIFs, clearances, ugh…
You don’t want to use a contagious pathogen as a weapon unless you can precisely target it and ensure all those you care about are immune.
Granted, the same logic can be applied to justify universal health coverage but people can’t be expected to be that rational, empathetic and wise.
If there turns out to be maybe two or three viable vaccines out of perhaps 50 vaccine projects, who is going to fund the failed projects?
Treatments that are successful and profitable are used to offset the unsuccessful attempts to find treatments - allowing nations to steal the work of others would undermine that and companies are not going to have the resources to fund as many research projects.
It is not possible to determine which projects will be viable until long way down the road.
No.
In fact: HELL NO
Vaccine research should be open source (with strong copy-left protections). I’m typing this from a big-pharma computer, so I wont lax linguistic about the industry, but it should not be secret or protected by intellectual property law at all. Especially considering how much of the pharmaceutical industry in general is based directly on government funded research.
The fastest way for the world to come up with a vaccine is to openly share research between scientists. Which is exactly what is occurring, the entire world over.
The political pissing around about who gets initial production or how it will/should be distributed, is just that, POLITICAL PISSING.
The worlds intelligence services have been helpless spectators as their countries suffer.
Hiding vaccine science will simply ensure that they find something to do. A way they can help.
Can you seen how this might not be a great idea?
I saw a notice that Chinese actors are trying to steal research relating to a vaccine. I hate to say this… but good! Everyone should be collaborating, voluntarily or not, to end this crisis.
Thank you. I do agree with you. But where do you draw the line on what you in your lab discover that may not be used for benign purposes by bad actors. I’m referring to biowarfare.
Nor does the pathogen check its visa at the border. In infectious epidemic anywhere is potentially a pandemic everywhere.
This is the view a normal, sane person would hold. However, if you are a self-described “very stable genius”…
Pharmaceutical research is very much a boom or bust enterprise in general, but vaccines (which are generally one or two applications except for seasonal influenza) are not high value products to the point that their development and manufacture oftenhave to be subsidized. The anti-vaxxers know as little about the business side of phrarma research as they do about science.
Stranger