Is There A Vaccine Against Deliberate Misinformation?

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.

This is what he had to say:

"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).

So if Oxford U. had stuck to its original plan, there would potentially have been many plants around the world manufacturing the Oxford U. vaccine. So how is it India’s fault that Oxford sold an exclusive licence for its vaccine to AZ, which then failed to sign licenced production agreements with anyone other than SII?

BTW, please see this:

https://tinyurl.com/y56ysw49

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."

After he sent me this, I did my own reading. Please see this and this.

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:

This resonates rather disturbingly in the wake of the decision of Oxford U. to abandon its ‘common license’ idea:

I doubt if this is an ideal state of affairs for the world:

(This piece was first published on Professor V Anantha Nageswaran's blog and has been republished here with permission)