Cory Doctorow on Emerging Vaccines

In today’s Pluralistic post, Cory Doctorow continued his excellent coverage of vaccine apartheid and the truly disgusting refusal of capitalists to relinquish patents to allow the world to produce and receive vaccines, while highlighting some very promising new developments. “A covid vaccine for your airways” gives a look at nasal vaccines that may be more effective at preventing transmission and cheaper and easier to produce across the world, even in poorer countries.

[V]accine apartheid continues to reign supreme over the globe: the WTO’s vaccine waiver initiative stalled in the face of opposition from Big Pharma and the Gates Foundation, and the world’s poorest people are forced to serve as reservoirs and incubators for new variants.

But there’s promising news that addresses both of these issues: new vaccines that are royalty free, that offer superior protection and don’t require the extreme cold-chain or even the skilled needlework of the mRNA vaccines.

A covid vaccine for your airways

Nasal sprays (and nebulizers, which can deliver vaccines to the entire airway, down to the bronchioles) induce IgA antibodies “that thrive on mucosal surfaces like the nose and throat [and] may wane more slowly.”

And here’s where it all comes together: Cuba is a biotech powerhouse with five vaccines under development, including a nasal spray. These vaccines are crushing it in Stage III tests. Cuba is ramping up production, on the island and overseas, and supplying vaccines to the whole Global South.

It’s a powerful curative to the racist lie – peddled by Big Pharma and its apologists like Howard Dean – that brown people in poor countries are too primitive to make vaccines and so we should let Big Pharma harvest all the gains from publicly funded mRNA research and dribble out vaccines to the 2.6 billion poorest people in the world

A covid vaccine for your airways

Photo by Fusion Medical Animation on Unsplash