28 February 21
It's Live on the HomePage Now:
Reader Supported News
RSN: William Boardman | Biden's Flaccid Stance on Human Rights Offers Little Hope
William Boardman, Reader Supported News
Boardman writes:
ddressing the United Nations Human Rights Council on February 24, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken had an opportunity to demonstrate the Biden administration’s break with the past by establishing a new level of human rights leadership. He failed. Judging by Blinken’s speech, the US is determined to break no new ground in a world awash in continuing human rights atrocities.
To be sure, Blinken began with the high-minded rhetoric expected on such occasions:
I’m here to reaffirm America’s commitment to respect and defend the human rights of all people, everywhere. As the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaims: all human rights are universal, indivisible, interdependent, and interrelated.
Blinken needs to “reaffirm” America’s commitment because President Trump broke it in June 2018 when he pulled the US out of the Human Rights Council for, in effect, failing to hew to US policy, especially with regard to Venezuela, Iran, and Israel. As the US ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley diplomatically said at the time, the council is a “protector of human rights abusers, and a cesspool of political bias.” She added that “America should not provide it with any credibility.”
Blinken, by avoiding any reference to such past unpleasantness, in effect claimed that America always held the moral high ground. That’s not only an expression of the myth of American exceptionalism, it’s a claim that has never been more than selectively true. It would not be offensive if the Biden administration showed any evidence that it would live up to the standards of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Blinken made no such express promise.
Blinken’s issue of greatest concern – one the Trump administration made into an excuse for leaving the council – was the council’s treatment of Israel:
As the United States reengages, we urge the Human Rights Council to look at how it conducts its business. That includes its disproportionate focus on Israel. We need to eliminate Agenda Item 7 and treat the human rights situation in Israel and the Palestinian Territories the same way as this body handles any other country.
This has about it a superficial veneer of fairness: address Israel with the same process as is used for every other country. But the US has never done that, time and again protecting Israeli predation with a UN veto or massive military firepower. Until the US shows some willingness to recognize Palestinians as human, the US has no moral ground for calling out anyone else. The reality in Israel/Palestine has long been brutal, with the Israelis committing the overwhelming majority of human rights abuses against Palestinians over more than seven decades.
That is the only issue Blinken highlighted. In terms of policy, this position is hardly different from Trump’s, except in tone. This is a huge and useless continuity in American policy that has failed and failed again.
After another half-dozen paragraphs of decent-sounding human rights boilerplate generalizations, Blinken outlines some specifics of US foreign policy under Biden, a list most remarkable for its omissions:
We will continue to call out abuses in places like Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, and Iran. We reiterate our call for the Russian government to immediately and unconditionally release Alexei Navalny, as well as hundreds of other Russian citizens wrongfully detained for exercising their rights. We will speak out for universal values when atrocities are committed in Xinjiang or when fundamental freedoms are undermined in Hong Kong. And we are alarmed by the backsliding of democracy in Burma, which is why our first action upon re-engaging the Council was on this very crisis.
We encourage the Council to support resolutions at this session addressing issues of concern around the world, including ongoing human rights violations in Syria and North Korea, the lack of accountability for past atrocities in Sri Lanka, and the need for further investigation into the situation in South Sudan.
If you stop to think about it for a nanosecond, this is a depressingly backward-looking manifesto. This is not a call for meaningful action so much as a ridiculous knee-jerk expression of Cold War values. It makes a mockery of Blinken’s proclamation that “The United States is fully committed to the universal protection and promotion of human rights.” The US may have had good days in the past, but the US has never been fully committed to the universal protection and promotion of human rights.
Continuing to “call out abuses in places like Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, and Iran” is a stale ritual denunciation of countries we have victimized for decades, from imposing dictatorships to conducting economic warfare. These are countries to which we have long owed an olive branch, no matter what human rights issues they may have. US judgment here is narrow, political, one-sided, and mindless.
No one with a serious commitment to human rights should single out Cuba and fail to breathe a word about Haiti, a country whose sufferings include more than 200 years of US predation.
No one of decent conscience should single out Venezuela without addressing the decades of suppression and murder the US has supported in Colombia.
No one with any sense of moral balance could single out Nicaragua while ignoring the destruction the US continues to support in Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. Nicaragua treats refugees from those wretched US “friends” better than the US does.
No one with a rational view of the Middle East could pretend that the worst place in the region is Iran. Surely Saudi Arabia is worse, a vicious family police state that oppresses women and foreigners, wages aggressive war on its neighbor Yemen, and executes a US-based journalist in the most blood-curdling fashion in a foreign country with hardly a ripple of official displeasure from the US, even now. Saudi Arabia commits crimes against humanity on a daily basis, but the US doesn’t call out such abuses.
American hypocrisy covers the region. Authoritarian governments go unreprimanded by Blinken, from the petty despots of Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar, to the war criminals of the United Arab Emirates, to the torture regime of Egypt, to the merciless genocides in Syria (mentioned in passing) and Turkey. Yes, the behavior of some of these states makes Israeli treatment of Palestinians look benign in brutal comparison, but the US Secretary of State called out none of them and showed no sign of shame.
Blinken pulled his punches with Russia and China, with nary a word about Crimea or Tibet. He cited North Korea and he mentioned Burma but not Thailand, Sri Lanka but not India, South Sudan but not Somalia (another victim of American diplomacy).
Early in his speech, Blinken wrapped the cloak of American exceptionalism around America’s own human rights record:
The United States is placing democracy and human rights at the center of our foreign policy, because they are essential for peace and stability. This commitment is firm and grounded in our own experience as a democracy – imperfect and often falling short of our own ideals, but striving always for a more inclusive, respectful, and free country.
This is traditional American hogwash. America promotes peace and stability by making war on Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, among others, and by basing American troops in more than 80 countries, including some of the most hideous human rights violators. It is a myth that the US is “striving always for a more inclusive, respectful, and free country.” The historical record is a bit more spotty than that, as descendants of slaves and native peoples know all too well. Perhaps we are moving into a period of progress, but current US human rights atrocities still include the treatment of migrants and migrant children, the treatment of prisoners in a time of plague, and the tolerance of widespread poverty in the richest nation on earth. Addressing such issues in generalities, Blinken put a pollyanna gloss on them.
The American Secretary of State has delivered a foreign policy speech that could have been delivered a decade or two ago and would have been a skewed vision of the world then. The only new element here is that the US is rejoining the Human Rights Council, something of a minimum requirement. That reflects the reality that Trump is gone, at least for now. That also reflects a point of view that everything was hunky-dory before Trump. It wasn’t. Trump is gone. That’s good. If he’s replaced by some imaginary version of the past, that’s not hopeful, it’s awful.
William Boardman has over 40 years' experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary and a stint with Captain Kangaroo. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. A collection of his essays, EXCEPTIONAL: American Exceptionalism Takes Its Toll, published September 2019, is available from Yorkland Publishing of Toronto or Amazon.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
US Rep. Rashida Tlaib. (photo: Rebecca Cook/Reuters)
Rashida Tlaib and Debbie Dingell | Water Is a Human Right. It's Time We Start Treating It as One.
Rashida Tlaib and Debbie Dingell, The Washington Post
tay home, wear a mask, keep your distance and wash your hands.
These critical safety measures were imprinted onto our brains nearly a year ago when the covid-19 pandemic began. Hand-washing to prevent the spread of this deadly virus may seem like a no-brainer; after all, it’s what we’ve done for decades to prevent the spread of disease and maintain hygiene.
But some of the same governments telling people to wash their hands can still legally shut off their water if they can’t afford the bill. In most places in the United States, water departments source, sanitize and provide water for homes and businesses. Most are public utilities. A few, regrettably, are private, for-profit systems. Almost all are monopolies.
This system gives them the power to develop harmful habits and ignore calls to change. In Michigan’s 13th Congressional District alone, more than 3,000 families have been cut off from water access. But this is not just a Michigan issue. In Virginia, more than 500,000 residents are behind on water bills. In Pennsylvania, it’s 183,000. Across the country, many have seen water rate increases of 30 percent in less than a decade. Meanwhile, millions of workers have lost their jobs in the past year. The root causes of water inaccessibility were exposed by this public health crisis, and they cannot be ignored.
And for many Americans, water shutoffs are often only the beginning. Even after they pay off outstanding debt or arrange for payment plans, reconnection fees further penalize them. We need to move beyond treating missed payments as a moral failing and acknowledge the reality of families struggling as they try to make ends meet.
As water bills continue to skyrocket, governments routinely fail to meet their end of the bargain by not investing in infrastructure upgrades. As we know all too well in Michigan, the people of Flint are still suffering the deadly consequences of ignored, crumbling water systems and indifference from officials trying to save a few pennies. Residents were paying to maintain an antiquated system, only to be poisoned.
Food and Water Watch reports that as of January 2021, 56 percent of Americans — or 183 million people — live in states without any shutoff protections during this pandemic. Last year, only 20 states banned disconnections. Eleven of those moratoriums have already expired, and at least 226 private water utilities have also allowed their moratoriums to expire.
This pandemic didn’t create this crisis; it just made it worse. As with many systemic inequalities, covid-19 shined a spotlight on the suffering of many of our neighbors. Indeed, the lack of access to affordable, clean water has been a problem in our society for decades.
Last month, along with 77 of our colleagues, we introduced a measure that would create a $1.5 billion fund for local communities to assist with paying water bills for low-income residents. This legislation, supported by nearly 100 organizations, would require all cities and counties to reconnect service and impose a shutoff moratorium to receive federal funding. These requirements will not only help residents and local governments in the short term by providing access to water and funding to assist our front-line communities; they will also provide long-term solutions that will ensure everyone permanently has access to clean, affordable water.
Most Americans have taken this virus seriously. They wear masks. They socially distance. And they wash and sanitize. They stay away from friends and take care of family. Most of this involves little to no help from the government. So that same government cannot make it harder for us to comply with basic common sense.
Our families need access to clean, affordable and safe water to combat the spread of the coronavirus, maintain good hygiene, and avoid other deadly viruses, bacteria and illnesses. In the wealthiest nation on earth, there should not be a single family without water. We’ve had enough of punishing people for being poor, leaving them susceptible to this deadly pandemic and other daily dangers simply because they cannot afford their water bill. It is time to take our public health seriously and guarantee water as a human right. Water is a human right. It’s time we start treating it as such.
Malcolm X in 1965. (photo: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
The Assassination of Malcolm X: Ex-Undercover Officer Admits Role in FBI and Police Conspiracy
Democracy Now!
MY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, Democracynow.org, the Quarantine Report. I’m Amy Goodman. The FBI and New York police departments are facing new calls to finally open their records related to the assassination of Malcolm X, shot dead 56 years ago at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, February 21st, 1965. This comes after the release of a deathbed confession of a former undercover New York police officer who admitted to being part of a broad New York police and FBI conspiracy targeting Malcolm. In the confession, the former officer Raymond Wood, who died last year, admitted he entrapped two members of Malcolm’s security team in another crime, a plot to blow up the Statue of Liberty, just days before the assassination. On Saturday, Ray Wood’s cousin Reggie Wood read the letter at a news conference at the Shabazz Center in Harlem.
REGGIE WOOD: It was my assignment to draw the two men into a felonious federal crime, so that they could be arrested by the FBI and kept away from managing Malcolm X’s Audubon Ballroom door security on February 21st, 1965.
AMY GOODMAN: In his letter, Raymond Wood also revealed he was inside the Audubon Ballroom at the time of Malcolm’s assassination. At least one other undercover New York police officer, Gene Roberts, was also inside after infiltrating the security team of the Organization of Afro-American Unity, the group Malcolm founded after leaving the Nation of Islam. Both officers, Wood and Roberts, were part of the Bureau of Special Services and Investigations, or BOSSI, a secretive political intelligence unit of the NYPD nicknamed The Red Squad.
Following Malcolm’s assassination, police arrested three members of the Nation of Islam for his murder, but questions about the guilt of the men have lingered for decades. In his letter, Raymond Wood openly says one of the men, Thomas Johnson, was innocent and was arrested to quote “protect my cover and the secrets of the FBI and the NYPD,” unquote. Ray Wood’s letter echoes claims in recent books by Manning Marable and Les Payne that some of Malcolm’s actual assassins were never charged. In a moment, we will be joined by Raymond Wood’s cousin Reggie Wood, who released his deathbed confession. But first, I want to turn to the words of Malcolm X himself, speaking after his home in Queens was firebombed just a week before his assassination, February 14th, 1965.
MALCOLM X: My house was bombed. It was bombed by the Black Muslim movement upon the orders of Elijah Muhammad. Now, they had come around toÑthey had planned to do it from the front and the back so that I couldn’t get out. They covered the front completely, the front door. Then they had came to the back. But instead of getting directly in the back of the house and throwing it this way, they stood at a 45-degree angle and tossed it at the window so it glanced and went onto the ground. And the fire hit the window and it woke up my second-oldest baby. But the fire burned on the outside of the house. But had that fire, had that one gone through that window, it would have fallen on a six-year-old girl, a four-year-old girl and a two-year-old girl. And I’m gonna tell you, if it had done it, I’d have taken my rifle and gone after anybody in sight. I would not wait! And I say that because of this: the police know the criminal operation of the Black Muslim movement because they have thoroughly infiltrated it.
AMY GOODMAN: “Because they have thoroughly infiltrated it.” Those are the words of Malcolm X right before his assassination, right after his home was firebombed in February of 1965. Just days later, he was shot seconds after he took the stage at the Audubon Ballroom.
We are joined now by Reggie Wood, the cousin of Raymond Wood, author of the new book The Ray Wood Story: Confessions of a Black NYPD Cop in the Assassination of Malcolm X. Still with us, civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who attended that news conference with Reggie Wood at the Audubon Ballroom, now the Shabazz Center, where Malcolm X was assassinated 56 years ago. Reggie, thank you so much for joining us. You read parts of the letter this weekend. Talk about your cousin Ray Wood and what you understand happened, the conspiracy he alleges that he was a part of by the FBI and the New York Police Department to assassinate Malcolm X.
REGGIE WOOD: Good morning. Thank you for having me. Ray was a complicated man. I think based on his past experiences, he lived with a lot of fear and caution on a daily basis, which he instilled in me over the past ten years. But Ray was a person that lived as aÑhe lived as a very quiet and reserved person because of what he had experienced. He witnessed some horrible things firsthand and also realized that he was a part of it after the fact. And so therefore, Ray was told by his handlers not to repeat anything that he had seen or heard or he would join Malcolm. Therefore, for 46 years, Ray separated himself from the family in fear that he would put us in danger. Ray lived alone many years, and he finallyÑin his final years, when he realized that his cancer was reoccurring, he wanted to reconnect with family because he didn’t want to die alone. So I volunteered to move him to Florida so that my wife and I could take care of him and get him back and forth to his cancer treatments and things of that nature. Therefore, he trusted me enough to reveal this information. Asked me not to say anything until he passed away, but at the same time, not to allow him to take it to his grave.
AMY GOODMAN: You write in your book, Reggie Wood, “He had spent years living in relative obscurity wanting to ensure the cops wouldn’t preemptively act to silence him. He also feared retribution from society, especially the Black community. Ray was ashamed of what he’d been a part of and felt he had betrayed his own people. Due to his lugubrious feelings about his actions and fear for what might be done to him in retaliation, this 2015 article deeply impacted Ray.” And he is talking about this news coverage from FebruaryÑhe was talking about the article by Garrett Felber in The Guardian that really laid out your cousin’s seminal involvement here and the FBI police involvement in the assassination.
REGGIE WOOD: Yes. That book really details everything that happened. I felt that after consulting with Mr. Crump, I was looking for the best way to put this information out there. I wasn’t sure if it was safe to turn it over to authorities. Therefore, I just wrote everything that Ray told me into this memoir and made it available to the world so that everyone would see it and hear it at the same time. And I think that’s the best way to do it. It’s a load off of my back because I’m no longer in fear of the government trying to quiet me as well.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to news coverage from February 1965 about the police-orchestrated plot to blow up the Statue of Liberty. This was just days before Malcolm X’s assassination. This might be news to a lot of people, even old-time activists. In the video, Raymond Wood is seen being promoted for his role in that plot.
PERSON: The happy ending to the plot was written by a rookie policeman who had been on the force only eight months when he infiltrated the extremist group. His work led police to a quiet New York residential area where the dynamite had been hidden. Another arrested was Khaleel Sayyed who police say went to the Statue of Liberty to buy a model and further the plot with the fourth conspirator, Walter Bowe. The hero cop, his face hidden for future undercover work, is promoted on the spot to the rank of detective, a happy climax to a bizarre story.
AMY GOODMAN: The arrests were carried out on February 16th, just days before Malcolm X was assassinated. And this is very significant, Reggie Wood, as you know, this so-calledÑ
REGGIE WOOD: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: ÑStatue of Liberty plot, because these men who were arrested were the security team of Malcolm X, meaning he wouldn’t have them there February 21st, a few days later when he was assassinated.
REGGIE WOOD: That’s correct. That’s correct. As we were doing our research, my research assistant, Lizzette Salado, really helped me put the pieces together. We whiteboarded everything that Ray said and attempted to connect it to facts that the FBI had released and that historians had pulled out. And we worked closely with some historians to try to corroborate the information that was there. And once we were able to do that, we were able to present that information to Mr. Crump and show that this was a legitimate situation that needed to be brought to light.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, in the 2015 article in The Guardian, historian Garrett Felber reveals notes written by the late Japanese American activist Yuri Kochiyama. At a meeting held in 1965, she identified Ray Wood to be at the scene of Malcolm X’s assassination. She wrote, quote, “Ray Woods [sic]”Ñshe wrote, with an “s”Ñ”Ray Woods [sic] is said to have been seen also running out of Audubon, was one of two picked up by police, was the second person running out,” Yuri wrote. This appears to substantiate some of the accounts of a second man taken into police custody after the assassination. I spent many hours with Yuri Kochiyama talking to her at an assisted-living facility at the end of her life in Oakland before she died. Can you talk about what happened at the assassination? Because Yuri is right here. She was very close to Malcolm X, up on the stage with him as well, at the end, after he was shot. That your cousin ran out and was taken away by police?
REGGIE WOOD: Yes. What Ray basically explained to me was that once he saw what was going down and he realized what had actually happened, after spending time with Mr. Sayyed and Mr. Bowe, he was there and he reminisced or thought about the situation with him coming into the Audubon without being checked. He thought about the fact that those guys were in prison as we spoke. And he decided he needed to get out of there.
And as he was leaving, some individuals that knew him from his other undercover workÑand he had been exposed somewhat from the bombing caseÑsaw him and they attempted to grab him. As they were grabbing him, trying to restrain him, a police officer intervened and grabbed Ray and took him into the police car. And from there, they took him to the precinct and put him into a cell where he sat there for three to four hours not knowing what was going on. The only information that he had was listening to the chatter on the radio while they were transporting him to the police station.
And later that afternoon, the same two gentlemen that told him to go to the Audubon came and removed him from his cell and drove him back home and told him, quote, “Do not speak of this again or you will face similar consequences.”
AMY GOODMAN: Did he know Gene Roberts, the other undercover officer, or at least one other that we know of who was there?
REGGIE WOOD: No, he did not. He did not know him. He did not know he was an undercover. He assumed he was part of Malcolm X’s team.
AMY GOODMAN: So Ben Crump, you ended the last segment where we want to talk at the end of this segment, and that is the issue of what evidence is out there that the police or the FBI is hiding and what you are calling for. It’s interesting that last week a judge ruled, a court ruled that the disciplinary records of New York police going back for years must be released. De Blasio said they’re releasing them, the mayor of New York. Not clear if they are being released at this moment. That’s disciplinary records. And the police unions have been fighting this tooth and nail. What are you calling for in this case?
BENJAMIN CRUMP: Well, Amy, thank you for covering this important matter as well. And to Reggie Wood who has put forth this dying declaration letter from his cousin, Ray Wood, and documented all the corroborating evidence, and the memoir that he and Lisette researched to show that everything in that letter is true. It is legitimate. And that is very important to help exonerate all of those Black people who were wrongfully convicted by Ray Wood’s work. All those people who have been conspired against by the NYPD and the FBI, whether that be Walter Bowe, Khaleel Sayyed, whether it be Thomas Johnson who was picked upÑwho wasn’t even at the Audubon Ballroom, but to ensure that Ray’s cover would not be blown, was arrested and served almost three decades in prison for a crime of killing Malcolm X that they all knew he did not do.
And also Tupac Shakur’s mother, Afeni Shakur, part of the Panther 21, who Ray Wood testified against saying that they tried to blow up New York monuments and therefore, quite literally, she was imprisoned when she had her prince [sp] Tupac Shakur, because of NYPD and the FBI were conspiring to wrongfully convict them.
And as Ray Wood said in his letter, their job was to discredit civil rights organizations and Black leaders. And that’s why we are calling for a Malcolm X Commission to be convened by the United States Congress so his daughters but also the people who was affected by these felonious actions of NYPD and the FBI to target Black people can be exposed. Because, Amy, the past is prologue. As Reggie Wood and I have often talked, the same way they targeted Malcolm X for saying that Black people deserve equality by any means necessary, they are targeting young Black Lives Matter activists today, labeling them as Black identity extremists. And so we need to have our federal government be held to account for trying to stop Black people from exercising their First Amendment rights, but more importantly, for being able to declare that Black Lives Matter over and over again.
AMY GOODMAN: Benjamin Crump, we want to thank you for being with us, civil rights attorney, speaking to us from New Orleans. And thank you to Reggie Wood, author of the new book The Ray Wood Story: Confessions of a Black NYPD Cop in the Assassination of Malcolm X. Reggie Wood speaking to us from Tampa, Florida.
When we come back, we will get reaction from Ilyasah Shabazz, one of the six daughters of Malcolm X, who herself has just written a young adult novel based on her father’s time in jail. Stay with us.
Medical worker Saku Huuskonen gives a vaccination against the COVID-19 coronavirus to a patient at the Helsinki Fair Centre in Helsinki on February 17, 2021. (photo: Heikki Saukkomaa/Lehtikuva/AFP/Getty Images)
ALSO SEE: Should We Be More Careful
Outdoors as Covid-19 Variants spread?
Finland Had a Patent-Free COVID-19 Vaccine Nine Months Ago - but Still Went With Big Pharma
Ilari Kaila and Joona-Hermanni Makinen, Jacobin
team of leading Finnish researchers had a patent-free COVID-19 vaccine ready last May, which could have allowed countries all over the world to inoculate their populations without paying top dollar. Yet rather than help the initiative, Finland's government sided with Big Pharma — showing how a patent-based funding model puts profit over public health.
“We felt it was our duty to start developing this type of alternative,” says professor Kalle Saksela, chair of the Department of Virology at the University of Helsinki. “Back in the spring, I still thought that surely some public entity will get involved and start pushing it forward. Turns out that no situation is urgent enough to compel the state to start actively pursuing something like this.”
Saksela’s team has had a patent-free COVID-19 vaccine ready since May 2020, which they dubbed “the Linux of vaccines” in a nod to the famous open-source operating system that also originated from Finland. The work is based on publicly available research data and predicated on the principle of sharing all new findings in peer-reviewed journals.
The research team includes some of Finland’s scientific heavyweights, such as Academy professor Seppo Ylä-Herttuala of the A. I. Virtanen Institute, a former president of the European Society of Gene and Cell Therapy, and academician Kari Alitalo, a foreign associated member of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States. They believe their nasal spray, built on well-established technology and know-how, is safe and highly effective.
“It’s a finished product, in the sense that the formulation will no longer change in any way with further testing,” Saksela says. “With what we have, we could inoculate the whole population of Finland tomorrow.”
But instead of exploring the potential of intellectual property–free research, Finland, like other Western countries, has continued to follow the default policy of the last several decades: to lean fully on Big Pharma.
In the mainstream narrative, the first-generation COVID-19 vaccines from Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca are typically presented as an illustration of how markets incentivize and accelerate vital innovation. In reality, the fact that the profit motive is the overriding force shaping medical research has been devastating — particularly in a global pandemic. The Finnish vaccine provides a striking case study of the many ways in which the contemporary patent-based funding model has slowed down vaccine development, and how it currently hampers the possibility of conducting effective mass-inoculation campaigns.
The need to discover the next breakthrough proprietary product has many corrosive effects on research. It incentivizes companies to conceal their findings from each other and from the wider scientific community, even at the cost of human health. The intellectual property–free “open-source” model aims to reverse this and turn research into a multilateral collaborative effort rather than a race to invent and reinvent the wheel.
When it comes to COVID-19 specifically, the stalling impact of the contemporary funding model is felt most acutely at the final stages: getting the finished product approved and into use. Whatever time was lost during the early days of the pandemic due to lack of collaboration and trade secrets, virologist Saksela points out, is relatively insignificant. In fact, the development of all first-generation COVID-19 shots has been straightforward.
“The background research was finished in an afternoon, which then set the direction for all of them,” Saksela says. “Based on what we already know about SARS-1 and MERS, it was all quite obvious — not some triumph of science.” Instead of introducing an inactivated or weakened germ into the human body, the new coronavirus shots train our immune system to respond to a “spike protein” — in itself, harmless — which forms the characteristic protrusions on the virus’s surface.
The widely shared understanding of this mechanism predates the pharmaceutical companies’ contributions. This raises questions about the impact of patent-driven research on the end product. To what extent is the work guided by medical efficacy, and how much is based on the need to retain proprietary ownership?
“Different biotech firms would slap the spike protein onto some type of delivery mechanism, whether it was RNA technology or something else,” Saksela explains. “And typically, the choice is based on what applications they have a patent on, whether it’s the best option or not.”
The Finnish vaccine uses an adenovirus to carry the genetic instructions for synthesizing the spike protein. One of its practical advantages is that, unlike with RNA technology based on lipid nanoparticles, it can be stored in a regular fridge, potentially even at room temperature. This makes for easier and cheaper delivery logistics with no requirement for ultra-cold storage. Beyond its stability and the convenience of nasal administration, the vaccine may have other superior qualities to many currently on the market, Saksela’s team believes. “In order to fully stop the virus from spreading and to get rid of new mutations, we need to induce sterilizing immunity,” meaning that the virus no longer replicates within the body of an otherwise healthy person. Preliminary animal and patient trials seem to confirm that the nasal spray accomplishes this. “With about half the people who are exposed, even if they’re symptomless, you find that the virus is still present in the upper respiratory system. So even if it’s on the way out, it still gets to run amok through the front door, making your immune system into a training partner of sorts.”
But if the vaccine is as good as advertised, what’s holding it back? Outside of Big Pharma and venture capital, few mechanisms remain to secure funding for the large-scale patient trials necessary to carry a vaccine past the finish line. Patents are state-sanctioned monopolies that hold the promise of potentially massive returns on investment. The contemporary funding model of pharmaceutical research is almost entirely pinned on that expectation, and this is where an intellectual property–free medical product runs into serious roadblocks.
A Phase III clinical trial requires tens of thousands of human subjects and would cost around $50 million. But considering that despite Finland’s relative success in controlling the virus, the country has already had to borrow an additional €18 billion ($21 billion) to get by, the sum starts to look more like a drop in the ocean — adding up to about one quarter of a percent of the pandemic-induced public debt so far. The number becomes absurdly small when contrasted with the loss of life and economic devastation around the globe.
This situation is especially absurd when we consider that so-called private pharmaceutical research is itself majority public funded. Moderna received $2.5 billion in government assistance and still attempted to fleece buyers with exorbitant prices. Pfizer has boasted not having taken any taxpayer money, but the PR campaign has little to do with reality: the vaccine is based on applications of public research developed by the German firm BioNTech, which has been additionally supported by the government to the tune of $450 million.
These numbers are only the tip of the iceberg when we consider the capital that countries pour annually into universities, scientific institutions, education, and basic research. This is how the body of knowledge and know-how that underlies all innovation is built.
“For instance, we have these new types of biological drugs, related to vaccines in a technical-scientific sense, produced with the same kind of DNA technology, where the pricing is comparable to extortion,” Saksela says. “It’s very sad. Whatever is the largest sum you can extort from a person or the state dictates the cost. And of course, they’re ultimately based on publicly financed research, just as is the case with vaccines.”
In other words, we are paying for the same shot twice: first for its development, then for the finished product. But there might be even a third price tag, since governments have agreed to assume responsibility for the potential side effects of coronavirus shots. This is a typical dynamic between large corporations and states: profits are private, risks are socialized.
“And yet, when I’ve tried to advocate for Finland to develop its own vaccine, this is the main argument I’ve kept hearing: that you need to have an entity with broad enough shoulders to take on the risk,” Saksela says. “But that’s all empty talk, turns out, since the companies are demanding, and receiving, freedom from any liability.”
The current patent monopoly–based system is a relatively recent development, not some unavoidable side effect of capitalism. Until as recently as the late 1940s, governments primarily funded medical research, while the role of pharmaceutical companies was confined mostly to manufacturing and selling drugs. Nowadays, governments support companies in the form of various subsidies and monopolistic privileges.
The damage goes well beyond shortages and high prices. For one, stopping a disease in its tracks is bad business. In one famous instance, the biotech company Gilead saw its profits fall in 2015–16 as a result of its new hepatitis C drug — because it ended up fully curing most patients. The same perverse incentive structure has sabotaged efforts to create preemptive vaccines, despite urgent calls from public health experts for the last twenty years.
By investing in predictive research, the outbreak could have been stopped in China. In an interview with the New York Times, professor Vincent Racaniello of Columbia University’s Department of Microbiology and Immunology puts it bluntly: “The only reason we didn’t is because there wasn’t enough financial backing.” Disease ecologist and public health expert Peter Daszak agrees: “The alarm went off with SARS, and we hit the snooze button. And then we hit it again with Ebola, with MERS, with Zika.”
Unfortunately, there aren’t many signs yet of political leaders waking up. There is a desperate shortage of vaccines, while pharmaceutical companies struggle to keep up even with their own production estimates. This is a direct result not only of the sanctity of patents, but of how the game is rigged against solutions created outside the profit-driven system. Because vaccines can only be produced in laboratories owned or authorized by the patent holders, most of the world’s pharmaceutical factories lie idle. An emergency solution proposed by India and South Africa, backed at the World Trade Organization by a majority of the world’s governments, sought to suspend intellectual property rights on COVID-19 shots. Rich countries, led by the United States and the European Union, categorically refused.
Meanwhile, wealthy nations have made the lion’s share of all vaccine preorders. Ethics aside, this is a catastrophic way to combat a pandemic. Inadequate amounts of vaccines are being produced to begin with and distributed based on wealth rather than a sane public health policy. Even the rich countries end up shooting themselves in the foot as the virus is allowed to keep spreading and mutating over most of the globe.
Within this global hierarchy, Finland is among the more privileged countries. But the bottleneck in vaccine production is having an adverse effect on everyone, Finns included. As Professor Saksela emphasizes, it is crucial to start taking preparedness seriously, both on the national and global levels. The world is far from getting the current pandemic under control, and the grim fact is that the next one is only a matter of time.
“That it’s all left up to market forces is a sign of the current times,” Saksela says. “Whether that’s a wholly wise approach should at least be carefully considered.”
Finland is often portrayed in international media as a Nordic dreamland. During the pandemic, its new left-wing government has further boosted the country’s progressive image. One might expect such a government to be the most obvious advocate of publicly financed and freely shared vaccine technology. But the last few decades — the era of neoliberalism — have cast a long shadow.
Mirroring a general trend among its counterparts, the ruling Social Democratic Party began to remodel itself in the 1990s after Tony Blair’s New Labour and the Clinton Democrats. In 2003, Finland’s national vaccine development program was discontinued, after 100 years in operation, under a Social Democratic minister of health, making way for multinational drug companies.
Though the vaccine has received much attention in Finnish media, with an opposition much more hostile to the public sector than the parties in power, there is little debate about it within the political establishment. And in lieu of direct state funding, Saksela and his partners have received advice from the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health: to establish a startup and begin courting venture capitalists.
Saksela is hopeful they might yet secure the necessary funding. But it has meant embracing, at least in part, the topsy-turvy logic of market-driven medical research: however good or lifesaving your product is, unless you intend to make money, it will be very hard to get off the ground.
“A Phase III trial will still yield intellectual property around our vaccine that we believe to be potentially profitable,” Saksela says, “even if it’s not exploitatively profitable.”
Undocumented immigrants from El Salvador are searched before boarding an aircraft in Arizona for a repatriation flight back to their home country. (photo: Matt York/AP)
A Judge Blocked Biden's Big Pause on Deportations, but ICE Says It Will Continue to Focus Only on Certain Immigrants
Hamed Aleaziz, BuzzFeed News
Aleaziz writes:
espite the legal setback, ICE officers were told to remain focused on immigrants who pose national security or other public safety threats, along with people who arrived in the US after Nov. 1.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement employees were told Thursday that despite a federal judge blocking President Joe Biden's pause on deportations, they should still focus on removing people that fit the new administration’s priorities, such as those deemed public safety threats, according to an email obtained by BuzzFeed News.
Federal Judge Drew Tipton on Tuesday indefinitely blocked the Biden administration from continuing with a 100-day moratorium on most deportations. Tipton, a Trump appointee, said the memo violated administrative law and that the state of Texas, which had filed a lawsuit challenging the White House, adequately showed it would face harm from higher numbers of detainees and public education costs.
The court order was a blow to Biden’s goal of pausing deportations while reviewing Department of Homeland Security policies and potential reforms. However, in issuing his order, Tipton did not require DHS to deport certain individuals or roll back a change in priorities for whom to arrest and detain.
Biden’s moratorium applied to all noncitizens with final deportation orders except those who have engaged in a suspected act of terrorism, people not in the US before Nov. 1, 2020, or those who have voluntarily agreed to waive any right to remain in the country.
Matthew Allen, the acting deputy director of ICE, wrote to employees that even though the court order blocked Biden’s moratorium, it does not prevent them from making case-by-case deportation decisions, like granting a stay for those facing removal from the country.
ICE employees were told to not consider the blocked moratorium in determining whether to deport someone, but they should continue to follow earlier guidance on the “prioritization of removal resources.”
In January, a DHS memo told employees to focus their efforts on immigrants who pose national security or other public safety threats, along with people who arrived in the US after Nov. 1. In February, ICE also directed officers to focus its enforcement resources on basically the same pool of people.
A Department of Homeland Security official told reporters at the time that the interim guidelines, which are expected to be followed by another directive in May, will help the agency “better perform” its mission.
The email sent Thursday comes amid the Biden administration’s attempts to reform the much-maligned agency and the work it carries out across the country. Former president Donald Trump’s directive in 2017 made nearly every undocumented immigrant a priority for arrest, leading to a higher proportion of those without criminal convictions being picked up.
Some immigrant advocates and experts have pushed the Biden administration to reel back deportations, regardless of the order.
“The Biden administration should seek a stay of this order, which contradicts the broad power to make enforcement decisions that the federal government generally holds,” Jaclyn Kelley-Widmer, a professor at Cornell University’s Immigration Law and Advocacy Clinic, said in a statement. “Further, even though this order prohibited a complete stop to deportations, the Biden administration can and should be more careful with deportations it does conduct.”
For his part, Tipton questioned in his order why the moratorium was even necessary.
“Why does DHS need a 100-day pause on removals to ‘fairly and efficiently’ process immigration and asylum applications at the southwest border? Why is pausing removals essential to redirecting immigration resources? And equally crucial, why and how does the pause connect to the new Executive’s need to reset priorities?” he wrote.
Pro-democracy activist Benny Tai. (photo: Tyrone Siu)
Dozens of Leading Hong Kong Pro-Democracy Campaigners Charged With Subversion
Jessie Pang and James Pomfret, Reuters
Excerpt: "Forty-seven Hong Kong pro-democracy campaigners and activists were charged on Sunday with conspiracy to commit subversion in the largest single crackdown on the opposition under a China-imposed national security law."
Texas after the severe Winter storm this month. (photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
'Solidarity, Not Charity': Mutual Aid Groups Are Filling Gaps in Texas' Crisis Response
Alexandria Herr, Grist
Herr writes:
hen a severe winter storm tore through Texas last Monday, Kirby Lynch lost water and power in her RV home in Collin County. The snow came up to her ankles — higher than she’d ever seen in her life. Nonetheless, Lynch’s first instinct was to get to work. Lynch is one of two organizers behind North Texas Rural Resilience, a mutual aid collective that services rural areas outside of the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
In the wake of the storm, Lynch and Sakiewicz delivered groceries and supplies and found hotel rooms for people without housing, despite bad roads and store closures. North Texas Rural Resilience is one of a plethora of mutual aid organizations that sprang into action in the wake of the storm across Texas. Similar organizations, including Austin Mutual Aid, DFW Mutual Aid (in the Dallas-Fort Worth area), and Mutual Aid Houston, have been organizing on the ground and through social media to redistribute funds to people in need, house people from homeless encampments in hotels, and organize supply drives and deliveries of food and water to communities impacted by power outages, freezing temperatures, and water and food shortages.
Extreme weather (including, potentially, extreme cold) will only accelerate as climate change progresses, and groups facing structural inequality — including low-income communities, communities of color, and people with precarious housing situations — feel the burden of these extreme events hardest. With “solidarity, not charity” as their guiding principle, these mutual aid groups aimed to lighten that burden and fill the gap in services left by the government in the days immediately following the storm.
Lynch got into mutual aid after a friend launched Feed the People Dallas, another mutual aid group that launched in April 2020. After working in Dallas for a while, she realised that there was a need for mutual aid in her own community, which struggles with food insecurity, and launched North Texas Rural Resilience with Lucy Sakiewicz, another Collin County resident, in September. She started posting notices on Craigslist, getting referrals from friends who were social workers, and finding people who needed assistance through Instagram. Over time, she built up a list of people who regularly needed groceries and other supplies. Lynch and Sakiewicz started organizing weekly grocery deliveries to people who needed food, as well as other services like book drives and rides to the polls for the election. Regular monthly donors covered about a third of their costs, and Lynch and Sakiewicz footed the rest of the bill themselves.
In the wake of the storm, Lynch and Sakiewicz said they saw more first-time donors than ever before. They weren’t the only ones seeing a record influx of donations. Austin Mutual Aid spent $300,000 housing people in the wake of the pandemic, an amount they were able to crowdfund in part because infographics listing their Instagram account went viral on social media. (Disclosure: This reporter donated $25 to Austin Mutual Aid last week.) Tammy Chang of Mutual Aid Houston said donations skyrocketed in the wake of the storm; Chang decided to create a GoFundMe campaign to collect donations after exceeding the Venmo payment limit. By the next morning, the campaign had amassed $130,000 — “more money than I’d ever seen in my entire life,” they said. As of Thursday, the GoFundMe campaign has collected more than $294,000.
Mutual Aid Houston hasn’t always been this large of an organization. Chang started the group as a senior in college in March 2020 as a Twitter account designed to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. At first, it didn’t gain much traction — they mainly used it as a place to share resources and amplify individual requests for funds. But during the summer’s Black Lives Matter protests, the group started to grow — as people were arrested at protests, Chang and the other organizers behind Mutual Aid Houston started to use the page to organize support for protestors who had been arrested. Soon, Mutual Aid Houston had amassed a large enough following to start collecting donations for direct aid days — daylong crowdfunding campaigns to give money to anyone living in the Houston area who needed it for groceries, medical bills, and rent. The only requirement was that the requester live in the Houston area, said Chang — “we aren’t means-testing,” or asking recipients to prove eligibility.
With such a massive influx of money, Chang and the other organizers at Mutual Aid Houston decided that the best thing to do in the wake of the storm would be to meet immediate need by giving out direct cash payments of $100 to people on their request list. “We figured that this $100 could go to anyone who needs food, water, anything really urgent,” said Chang. As of Wednesday, $197,000 of the money raised on GoFundMe had been given to 1,970 Houstonians in just 72 hours. In addition to the direct cash aid, Mutual Aid Houston is also organizing supply distribution sites, collecting canned goods, water, personal protective equipment, and sanitary and baby supplies for people in need.
Not asking for proof of income or hardship is a core tenant of mutual aid, according to Chang and Sakiewicz. Chang says they find that many people who receive aid from Mutual Aid Houston end up passing it forward — either by applying to volunteer with the group or donating to future campaigns. To Chang, this reflects the ethos of solidarity within the community: “Take what you need, give what you can.” On top of that, organizers from Mutual Aid Houston and North Texas Rural Resilience alike are already members of the community — and for Sakiewicz, that is a big part of why their work is well positioned to respond to a crisis like a winter storm. “We spend all our time and resources directly with the people,” said Sakiewicz. “It’s the people next door, the people in our neighborhoods, so we’re fully positioned to be ready when a crisis happens. Who better to mobilize the community than people who are already in the community?”
Austin Graham, a 21-year-old volunteer with Austin Mutual Aid, spent the hours and days following the storm driving to homeless encampments around the city, trying to rescue people exposed to the elements. Austin Mutual Aid covered the cost of their hotel stays, and in the days following the freeze Graham says they ferried more than 130 people from encampments to hotel rooms, amid freezing conditions and treacherous roads. Without the hotel stays, Graham says they fear many of the homeless people they served would have been left to die in the cold, given the lack of intervention from the city.
Chang said they haven’t seen much outreach from the county, city, or state government either, other than the opening of warming centers and a few water distribution sites. For Chang, the work of Mutual Aid Houston is about filling the gap left behind by the state. “We can’t rely on our representatives to send help,” they said. “We have to take care of each other.”
For Sakiewicz, the work is personal. “As a single mom who’s struggled financially, and I’m also a person in recovery from opiates,” she said, tearing up slightly, “if I can help love someone and get them to a place where they can help themselves and feel safe enough to do better and be who they want to be, then I have done my job in this world.”
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.