Biden’s team is loaded on drug money and it’s getting us killed

Joe Biden will likely kill as many people from COVID-19 as Trump. They just won’t be Americans. America is actively blocking global production at the WTO, preventing vital mRNA technology transfer, and simply sitting on its hands despite having all the leverage in the world.

America’s donations to COVAX are just blood money, they’re exporting zero vaccines, and preventing the world from producing more. In all of their actions, they are protecting the drug companies, because that’s who pays them. This is killing hundreds of thousands of people across the world, and makes Americans less safe as well.

In any other country you would call this rampant corruption ‘corruption’, because that’s what it is. Because America has legalized and racialized the very idea of corruption, this grift just sits there in plain sight. People happily disclose their millions of dollars in shares and nobody cares. And so we die.

Just look at these massive conflicts of interest. The foxes are in the henhouse. Of course the world is plucked.

Anita Dunn, the leading strategist on Biden’s presidential campaign who now serves as White House adviser, is on leave from her job as managing partner at the consulting firm she co-founded, SKDK, which provides extensive public relations and advertising services to Pfizer. Dunn intends to return to the SKDK this summer. SKDK, which did not respond to a request for comment, has continued to promote Pfizer’s vaccines on social media.

Susan Rice, the domestic policy adviser, holds up to $5 million in shares of Johnson & Johnson and up to $50,000 in shares of Pfizer, according to a disclosure made public this week.

Eric Lander, the White House science adviser, holds up to $1 million in shares of BioNTech, Pfizer’s partner for its coronavirus vaccine.

Secretary of State Anthony Blinken previously consulted for Gilead Science, the biotech company that produced remdesivir, the only Covid-19 treatment approved by the FDA so far.

Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, Biden’s pick for Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, previously served as an attorney advising both Pfizer and Gilead on federal policy issues.

(The Intercept)

All of these people stand to directly profit from the drug companies, and so give a fuck about a People’s Vaccine. They’re vaccinated, Americans will get vaccinated, and any mutated blowback is years aware. They’re loading up their retirement funds NOW. It’s a diverse looking crew, but disclosure don’t lie. You shouldn’t be owning shares in shit you’re supposed to be regulating. You shouldn’t be depending for work on the people it’s your job to control. Biden and his team all do.

Like terrorism, corruption is a word American simply cannot apply to themselves. White corruption is entirely opaque to organizations like Transparency International. But it is what is.

White terrorism really did blow up a street in Nashville, he wasn’t just having a bad day. White corruption really is getting thousands of people killed from COVID-19, disclosing corruption doesn’t just wash it away. Americans have to look at their own corruption, and not be distracted by the ‘nice guy’ act of the Democrats. As Michael Corleone said in The Godfather, “We’re both part of the same hypocrisy, Senator.” While Trump killed hundreds of thousands of Americans with petty corruption, Biden’s genteel corruption will kill hundreds of thousands across the world, and also puts Americans (and their precious economy) at risk.

I shall put it to you plainly, from an outside perspective. If your officials depend on drug companies for their supper, the world will starve. The United States has all the leverage it needs to deploy cheaper, faster, better, and easier mRNA technology across the globe for as little as $500 million (to start, according to former CDC Director Dr. Tom Frieden). They’re just not doing it. Not because it’s not in the interest of the American people, but because it’s not in the interest of your rulers stock portfolios. This is just textbook corruption.

The pharma companies want to make billions, and the Biden administration is paid off. You just have to employ these bureaucrats when they wash out of government, donate to both sides, and the stock market lets people corrupt themselves in public. For a few million in bribes, the drug companies are making a literal killing. They are stronger than the US government, because they simply pay the employees more. Susan Rice doesn’t have an up to $5 million dollar interest in the American people. Her interest is where her shares are. In Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer.

It seems crazy that the US effectively owns relevant patents (and also all the leverage) and doesn’t use them, until you understand the corruption at the Biden administration core.

This breakthrough, at the center of the 2020 race for a vaccine, actually came years earlier in a National Institutes of Health lab, where an American scientist named Dr. Barney Graham was in pursuit of a medical moonshot.

Exactly who holds patents for which vaccines won’t be sorted out for months or years. But it is clear now that several of today’s vaccines — including those from Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, Novavax, CureVac and Pfizer-BioNTech — rely on the 2016 invention. Of those, only BioNTech has paid the U.S. government to license the technology. The patent is scheduled to be issued March 30. (NYTimes)

All across the neoliberal world, research is public while profits are privatized. Bureaucrats walk through a revolving door, making the decisions that they will profit from. All the ruling elites buy stock and make decisions that move stock, they just have to file a report saying that they’re doing it. It’s become so normal that no one cares. But you really should.

The simple fact is that a pandemic is, by definition, global. It doesn’t give a fuck about our borders or stock portfolios. As the WHO has been saying for ever, no one is safe until everyone is safe. This isn’t a slogan, it’s a fact. Either we unite against the virus or it happily mutates around us.

Countries that the West demonizes — like China, Russia, or Cuba — recognize this fact. They can be evil in their own ways, but they’re not inhuman. They can be corrupt, but they’re not insane. These countries are sharing vaccines and technology because it’s the most basic thing a civilized nation can do, both in public and self-interest.

The west calls this ‘vaccine diplomacy’ because they simply cannot understand basic human decency. Where’s the profit in that? What the US calls some nefarious form of ‘diplomacy’ is just not being global assholes. Across the world we are suffering, but we are not insufferable assholes. We may lose our lives, but we retain our humanity. Americans may get vaccinated, but they have lost their souls. They think that Biden is so much better than Trump, but Trump was at least an obvious grifter. Biden’s grift is just the way things work. It is the corruption of America’s very soul.

As Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” America’s entire government is full of people that cannot understand the problems America or the world faces, because their salary depends on them not understanding. This is Biden’s COVID corruption in a nutshell.

A friend in need is a friend indeed. Americans are only friends in greed.

A historical crime against humanity is happening in America right now, and you need to get on the right side of history. A nation that will not unite with humanity against a virus barely deserves to be called human beings. A society so corrupt that it profiteers from a plague deserves nothing but contempt. Americans actually live in an oligarchy, but act like it’s a democracy for once. Speak up. We’ve been screaming from the Global South for months, from the WHO, from scientists across the world, but these people are supposed to work for you. If you do not speak out about this, may you be forever damned.

• Thousand of scientists have spoken out for a Global Public Vaccine in the British Medical Journal.
• The WHO has been speaking out forever and many people have signed their #Vaccinequity Pledge.
• A former CDC Director has spoken out in Politico.
• STAT News has spoken out in editorials.
• Many people in the Global South have spoken out, like here, and here.
• Billions of people are cursing the corrupt west every day.
• Where the fuck are you?