World
Is There A Vaccine Against Deliberate Misinformation?
- You know we need a vaccine against misinformation when a British newspaper finds a way to blame India for corona vaccines not reaching poorer nations.
Covid-19 vaccine - representative image (Twitter)
A friend of mine brought my attention to this piece in The Guardian. It was aggressive. Nay, even vicious. It somehow manages to blame India for the vaccines not reaching poorer nations. I was nonplussed. I ran this past Dr. Vidyasagar, who is the Chairman of the COVID-19 India National Supermodel Committee.
"One has to read the article carefully to find out that
(i) Oxford U. initially said they would allow anyone to manufacture their vaccine, i.e., “open source” it, and
(ii) on the advice of Bill Gates, Oxford U. then signed an exclusive deal with AstraZeneca, which in turn signed a deal with SII (Serum Institute of India).
BTW, please see this:
J&J was trying to manufacture its own vaccine in Baltimore, and had to destroy 15 million doses due to quality-related issues. Perhaps, this explains why, when The Quad decided to assign the manufacturing rights of the J&J vaccine to some company, they chose Biological E, another Hyderabad-based company. So it is not all that easy for other countries to replicate India’s vaccine production capacity and quality."
One of these articles had a reference to another article in Foreign Affairs published in March 2012 and the author makes an observation that is quite startling:
