alt Hacker NewsThis administration literally fast-tracked the original covid vaccines for approval.
Say what you will about the Covid vaccine or Kennedy’s specific motivations (which I disagree with), but choosing to cut government funding for development of wildly profitable pharmaceutical products is a reasonable choice.
Replies
Not many people know that Trump had a hand in starting the pandemic.
Here's what we know: In 2014, Obama administration halted the so called "gain of function" research because of risk of laboratory accidents. In 2017, the Trump administration restarted this dangerous research. See links below.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/18/us/white-house-to-cut-fun...
Excerpt: [Obama administration] White House announced Friday that it would temporarily halt all new funding for experiments that seek to study certain infectious agents by making them more dangerous. The White House said the moratorium decision had been made “following recent biosafety incidents at federal research facilities.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/health/lethal-viruses-nih...
Excerpt: [Trump administration] on Tuesday ended a moratorium imposed three years ago on funding research that alters germs to make them more lethal. Critics say these researchers risk creating a monster germ that could escape the lab and seed a pandemic.
So, Trump restarted the dangerous research that Obama had shut down. You may be thinking, what does that have to do with Covid? Covid started in Wuhan, China, right?
It turns out that the Trump administration, through the National Institutes of Health (NIH), provided funding to the EcoHealth Alliance, an American non-profit organization focused on studying emerging diseases. The EcoHealth Alliance, in turn, provided funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China for researching bat coronaviruses. The rest is history.
And then Trump also disbanded the pandemic preparedness team in 2018 just in time for the pandemic. See link below.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/nsc-pandemic-office-t...
Nope. Not this administration at all.
Trump 1 was a very different administration.
And Trump himself has publicly backed off what was probably his one major achievement after receiving pushback from his supporters.
The biggest single success from Trump’s first term is the thing his base hates to the point that they booed him over it.
It's literally not the same administration. Also yeah he wants private companies to stop "wild" profits while he grifts the nation with crypto, hosting UFC on white house? You have to be stupid or willfully ignorant to think the current administration gives a single f about unchecked profits or the people's general wellbeing.
My understanding is that vaccine research and production is almost never profitable and depends on government support. Either grants, guaranteed purchases, or both.