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Indonesia Stops Sharing Avian Virus Samples
dankrabach writes "Indonesia has apparently decided to play the IP game, with the world's health at stake. The country, one of the hardest-hit by avian flu, has stopped submitting virus samples to the World Health Organization, and is negotiating to sell them to an American drug company that makes the vaccine. They feel slighted when they give away such samples, but then cannot afford the patented vaccines. Logical to me, given the rules of the game; however, can't we come up with some GPL'ish license to free any product based on this data?"
This makes sense, though dismal that sense be. Holding human lives as so much merchandise, certainly it's nothing new - but that doesn't make is any less reprehensible.
Fight fire with fire, the old adage goes. Though sometimes I wonder why fire can't be fought with water instead.
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Why don't all of you who are moaning that drugs should be given for free for such things pool all your cash together and buy into a big drug company, get onto their board of directors and start making these changes from within.
Oh, sorry, I forgot that would mean that you'd have to invest and you'd have to risk your own wealth. Not too bright of a prospect when your own cash (and the shirt on your own back) is on the line is it?
For the most part the people who whine and moan about companies making big bucks are the last one to put their money where their mouth is to make a change.
It's an open market, friends, you have as much a right to buy into it and reap the rewards from it as anyone else. This same ability to amass wealth from this system would also give you the opportunity to make changes in what all too many of you consider a corrupt system.
If you do this do me one little favor: Print out your postings about this and keep them framed on your wall along side of your stocks in the newly founded open source bio-chemistry union. It'll be a hoot to go back and read these when either your company is going belly up or you find that you're just as greedy as the rest when it comes right down to it.
I'd be pissed too if i was indonesia.
Pissed about what? That Indonesian scientists couldn't find a cure? That a lot of people don't work for free? That the people who do work for free (or for charitable causes) didn't succeed?
I'd be unhappy in their case too, but who's really to blame? "No good deed goes unpunished", they say.
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The problem is that a "pandemic" like this is going to kill off the poorest, most ecologically friendly people on the planet, leaving the rich, resource hogging Americans and Western Europeans.
What is needed is some good old fashioned terrorists with nukes to start wiping out the West. 100 nukes in every major city in EU and USA would be a good start.
Come to think of it, once Iran gets things finished that is exactly what we can expect. No, I don't see a population problem, do you?