Throw Back: The US patent waiver proposal for Covid-19 vaccines in May of 2021

Germany hits back at US patent waiver proposal for Covid-19 vaccines

By Millie Turner | cityam.com | 2 min read

May 7, 2021

Germany has rejected the Covid-19 vaccine patent proposal, urging that production capacity is key to boosting vaccine output.

The country’s health minister said the primary challenge to increasing production volumes of vaccines is quickly and effectively transferring technology.

“The main issue is not patent protection but production capacity,” Jens Spahn, said at a news conference.

“I would be delighted if the United States shows the same willingness to export vaccines that we in Germany do,” Spahn added.

The US’s patent proposal seeks to waiver patent protections that vaccines would typically receive, in hopes that manufacturing would pick up speed if restrictions on who can make what was eased.

In normal times, patents protect profits of the multinational companies that make drugs and vaccines, making it illegal for rivals to turn out copycat versions for up to 20 years.

Amid a roaring pandemic that has emphasised worldwide inoculation, some say there is a cause for ditching the traditional patented pathway.

“This is a global health crisis, and the extraordinary circumstances of the Covid pandemic call for extraordinary measures,” the US’s trade representative, Katherine Tai, said.

UK

However, the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry hit back at the idea yesterday, saying it is ‘not the solution’ to unequal supplies of the jabs.

“In the short term, it will hinder vaccine scale-up and in the long term, significantly impact global investment into new vaccines and medicines,” the association said in a statement.

“Globally we must now focus on sharing excess doses of vaccines, maintaining the free movement of raw materials and properly funding COVAX – all of which the UK government has committed to doing.”

Germany

In their first major rift, the US and Germany have clashed on patent waiver commitments.

Berlin argued that a waiver would not increase production but instead would hinder future private-sector research.

“The US suggestion for the lifting of patent protection for Covid-19 vaccines has significant implications for vaccine production as a whole,” a German government spokeswoman said yesterday.

“The limiting factors in the production of vaccines are the production capacities and the high-quality standards and not patents,” she added, arguing that the companies were already working with partners to boost manufacturing capacity.

“The protection of intellectual property is a source of innovation and must remain so in the future.”

European Commission

The head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, has said the bloc was open to debate on the matter.

With the EU’s vaccination effort accelerating and 30 Europeans being vaccinated each second while exporting more than 200m doses, Von der Leyen said Europe was “also ready to discuss any proposals that address the crisis in an effective and pragmatic manner”.

“That’s why we are ready to discuss how the US proposal for a waiver on intellectual property protections for Covid-19 vaccines could help achieve that objective.”

Collapse incoming: European nations start RATIONING food and fuel

Sunday, April 03, 2022 by: Arsenio Toledo
Tags: American Journal, chaos, Collapse, famine, food rationing, food scarcity, food shortages, food supply, fuel rationing, fuel shortages, fuel supply, Germany, Globalism, Greece, Harrison Smith, hunger, InfoWars, rationing, Russia, sanctions, Shortages, Spain, starvation, Ukraine, Ukraine war

This article may contain statements that reflect the opinion of the author

(Natural News) Countries all over the world, especially in Europe, have started implementing policies that ration food and fuel.

Europe’s struggles with its food and fuel supplies began after most nations on the continent imposed economic sanctions on Russia following its invasion of Ukraine. This threatened the flow of already-critical commodities in Europe and threatened to collapse already-struggling global supply chains.

As a result, the prices of everything from oil to wheat have soared, leading to multi-decade high inflation rates. Supplies of these essential products have also dwindled after exports from Russia were completely strangled.

Sunflower oil, wheat, dairy and gas are being rationed

In Spain, the country started experiencing sporadic shortages of different products like eggs, milk and other dairy products almost immediately following the outbreak of the war in Ukraine. In early March, major supermarkets like Mercadona and Makro began rationing sunflower oil.

Spain’s left-wing government even went further and gave stores the option to temporarily impose limits on the number of certain products customers purchase.

In Greece, at least four national supermarket chains have started rationing food products like flour and sunflower oil due to critically low supplies caused by the crippled supply chains coming out of Russia and Ukraine.

The supermarkets claim the current rationing is only a preventive measure that will be rolled back once Greece’s supplies of flour and sunflower oil stabilize. Around 30 percent of Greece’s wheat imports come from Russia and Ukraine.

“The reason for the cap on these products is only precautionary, as our customers are concerned about the war in Ukraine,” said one official from supermarket chain Alfa-Beta Vassilopoulos. “We want to ensure we will be able to serve our customers’ needs in the future too.”

“Flour and sunflower oil are the two products which, apart from energy, the war has affected more than anything else,” said Greek Minister for Development and Investment Adonis Georgiadis. “There are already shortages throughout Europe.”

In Germany, the nation triggered the first part of a three-stage emergency plan to conserve the country’s natural gas supply. This move came after Russian President Vladimir Putin demanded that Germany pay for Russian gas in rubles in an attempt to twist Western sanctions against Russia.

The first stage of the emergency plan will lead to “targeted” shutdowns of the flow of natural gas to “specified individual large consumers.”

German Vice-Chancellor and Minister for Economic Affairs Robert Habeck explained that the current rationing plan is a preventive measure implemented to make sure the country doesn’t experience a critical shortage.

Germany is also attempting to reduce or outright eliminate its dependence on Russian gas. Before the war, 55 percent of Germany’s natural gas came from Russia. Now, that number has been reduced to 40 percent with the help of natural gas flows from the Netherlands, France and Belgium.

Food and fuel rationing a consequence of globalism

“The collapse is on … and no signs of slowing down anytime soon,” said Harrison Smith of InfoWars. “In fact, all evidence points to the contrary. It points to those in charge and with the ability to prevent the downside doing everything they can to exacerbate and perpetuate the total collapse of the world economy, particularly in Western countries.” (Related: Gas rationing, food vouchers and hunger are now being normalized for the war phase of the plandemic.)

Smith, the host of “American Journal” on InfoWars, noted that if the global economy wasn’t so dependent on imports from other nations, the war in Ukraine would not have caused such a massive problem for the food and fuel supplies of other nations.

“All of this is really just predicated on globalism. It wouldn’t really be that big of an issue if we didn’t get our toilet paper from China,” he said. “If some ship running aground in the Suez Canal, quite literally on the polar opposite side of the world, somehow makes it so that I can’t buy toilet paper … that’s a problem, and it’s a problem in our world structure.”

Learn more about the state of the global economy and the rationing of food and fuel around the world by reading the latest articles at MarketCrash.news.

Watch this episode of “American Journal” on InfoWars as host Harrison Smith talks about the start of food and fuel rationing in Europe.

https://www.brighteon.com/embed/2b5ef486-17af-463f-8119-e5d89dc92c27

This video is from the InfoWars channel on Brighteon.com.

Germany officially calls colonial-era killings in Namibia ‘genocide’

Some 75,000 tribespeople were killed after a revolt against land seizures in what historians have called the first genocide of the 20th century.

Herero tribesmen are held in chains around 1904 or 1905. Namibia spent decades under German rule after World War I, gaining independence in 1990.Ullstein Bild / via Getty ImagesMay 28, 2021, 5:44 AM CDT / Source: ReutersBy Reuters

BERLIN — Germany on Friday apologized for its role in slaughter of Herero and Nama tribespeople in Namibia more than a century ago and officially described the massacre as genocide for the first time, as it agreed to fund projects worth over a billion euros.

German soldiers killed some 65,000 Herero and 10,000 Nama members in a 1904-1908 campaign after a revolt against land seizures by colonists in what historians and the United Nations have long called the first genocide of the 20th century.

While Germany has previously acknowledged “moral responsibility” for the killings, it has avoided making an official apology for the massacres to avoid compensation claims.

In a statement announcing an agreement with Namibia following more than five years of negotiations, Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said the events of the German colonial period should be named “without sparing or glossing over them.”

“We will now also officially call these events what they were from today’s perspective: a genocide,” Maas said.

“In light of Germany’s historical and moral responsibility, we will ask Namibia and the descendants of the victims for forgiveness,” he said.

Germany has agreed to fund 1.1 billion euros of reconstruction and development projects that would directly benefit the genocide-affected communities, he said.

Namibian media reported on Thursday that the money would fund infrastructure, healthcare and training programs over 30 years.

Germany, which lost all its colonial territories after World War One, was the third biggest colonial power after Britain and France. However, its colonial past was ignored for decades while historians and politicians focused more on the legacy of Nazi crimes, including the Holocaust.

In 2015, it began formal negotiations with Namibia over the issue and in 2018 it returned skulls and other remains of massacred tribespeople that were used in the colonial-era experiments to assert claims of European racial superiority.

Source: 👇

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/germany-officially-calls-colonial-era-killings-namibia-genocide-n1268895?cid=sm_npd_nn_fb_nw&fbclid=IwAR1EZZyhmq1adgyJ8Y2GKHeHW_gocmiDmLaNk8z76f1Lh9f03-GYVTe_f28