Editor’s Note – SR Break

Stephan:  This will be the last SR for several days, I'm not quite sure how long. I go into the hospital for corrective surgery and will be there I'm not sure how long. I'm told one to four days, and then I am supposed to come home and stay in bed for a few more days. Please hold me in healing intention. More anon...
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‘A Game-Changer’: Defying Big Pharma, WHO Expands Vaccine Tech Sharing

Stephan:  The entire pharmaceutical industry needs to be refocused from its fundamentals to its details, because one of the things this pandemic has made clear is that the pharmaceutical corporations place profit above wellbeing. This report suggests there is now evidence that this may be beginning.
World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus is pictured with Petro Terblanche of Afrigen Biologics and Belgian Minister for Development Cooperation Meryame Kitir in Cape Town, South Africa on February 11, 2022.
Credit: Benoit Doppagne/Belga Mag/AFP via Getty

The World Health Organization on Wednesday announced it is expanding its mRNA technology transfer efforts to five additional countries as it works to bolster coronavirus vaccine manufacturing in the Global South, an initiative that seeks to overcome persistent obstruction from the pharmaceutical industry and rich nations.

Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan, Serbia, and Vietnam will be the newest recipients of mRNA vaccine technology from the WHO’s hub in Cape Town, South Africa, which has succeeded in creating an mRNA-based coronavirus vaccine modeled after Moderna’s shot—the sequence of which was reverse-engineered by Stanford University scientists and published online last year.

“These countries have seen the damage that reliance on the profit-hungry big pharmaceutical corporations has done.”

The nations will be added to the original list of recipients, which included Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, and Tunisia.

“These countries were vetted by a group of experts and proved that they had the capacity […]

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Covid-19: WHO efforts to bring vaccine manufacturing to Africa are undermined by the drug industry, documents show

Stephan:  This is the evidence upon which the previous story is based. I think it is disgusting and grounds for indicting, trying and convicting the management of the big pharma corporations involved with the Covid vaccines. They make it very clear that mass human death is of no interest to them. Only profit gets their attention.
Credit: BMJ

A foundation representing the vaccine maker BioNTech has been accused of seeking to undermine the World Health Organization’s initiative to bring covid vaccine manufacturing to the African continent, The BMJ can reveal.

The kENUP Foundation, a consultancy hired by BioNTech, has claimed that WHO’s hub, which is creating a covid-19 mRNA vaccine that African companies can make, is unlikely to be successful and will infringe on patents, documents obtained by The BMJ have shown. Instead, they show kENUP promoting BioNTech’s proposal to ship mRNA factories housed in sea containers from Europe to Africa, initially staffed with BioNTech workers, and a proposed new regulatory pathway to approve the vaccines made in these factories. The novel pathway has been described as paternalistic and unworkable by some experts, as it seems to bypass local regulators.

The move threatens the pan-African venture backed by WHO that seeks to scale up African production of lifesaving vaccines from 1% to 60% by 2040.1 The documents, published for the first time, reveal new details of the proposal from kENUP and BioNTech and their criticism […]

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Pfizer, Moderna and Other Drugmakers Make Billions Responding to Covid-19 Pandemic

Stephan:  The Wall Street Journal gives us the dollar facts about the profit obscenity going on in the vaccine leaders in the pharmaceutical industry. I think it is an appalling story. I am not against profit, but I am absolutely against profit being more important than human wellbeing. Note the difference between Pfizer and AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline
A Moderna vaccine production facility in Massachusetts.
Credit: Maddie Malhotra/The Wall Street Journal

Healthcare companies that came up with effective Covid-19 vaccines, treatments and tests are seeing a huge financial payoff and are starting to spend their cash, while grappling with questions about whether the growth is sustainable.

Companies including Pfizer Inc. and Moderna Inc. so far have reported at least $79 billion in combined global sales of Covid-19 vaccines and treatments for 2021, according to a Wall Street Journal review of recent earnings reports. Diagnostic sales also have been strong for companies including Abbott Laboratories, which had $7.7 billion in Covid-19 test sales last year.

It’s a market that didn’t exist prior to the pandemic. Many companies attempted to find pandemic countermeasures during 2020 but only some were successful.

Sales from the resulting products kicked into high gear in 2021, strengthening profits while adding to cash reserves.

Some companies are investing the windfalls in employee bonuses, share repurchases, internal research efforts to develop new drugs and vaccines, or pursuing acquisitions of other companies to bolster research and development pipelines.

But sales are already 

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‘Staggering’ study reveals nearly half of unemployed U.S. men have criminal convictions

Stephan:  I had no idea that one-third of American adults have been arrested at least once, that is an astonishing number, unlike any other developed country. In the interest of full disclosure, I was arrested multiple times back in the late 50s and early 60s for participating in civil rights demonstrations. Disorderly conduct and a $25 fine. I have always been rather proud of that, and it never stopped me from getting a job, or above Top Secret clearances when I was in government.
Researchers say employment services should now take into account that almost half of unemployed U.S. men have criminal convictions. Credit: Paul Vernon/AP

One in three adults in the United States has been arrested at least once, a strikingly high number compared with many other countries. Now, a new study reveals one of the implications of that figure: Nearly half of unemployed U.S. men have a criminal conviction by age 35, which makes it harder to get a job, according to an analysis of survey data.

The findings suggest having a criminal justice history is pushing many men to the sidelines of the job market, says sociologist Sarah Esther Lageson of Rutgers University, Newark, who was not involved in the study. “I’m not sure that many people understand just how prevalent an arrest is,” she says. “It really shows up [that unemployment] is actually a mass criminalization problem. … Because arrests are so common, they shouldn’t be considered in an employment context at all,” she says.

The work began when Amy Solomon, then head of the Federal Interagency […]

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