Drug lobby asks Biden to punish foreign countries pushing for low-cost vaccines

Meta: Curious why this submission doesn't gets pushed to the front page given the number of upvotes (10 in an hour)? Is there some sort of shadow ban due to the political nature of this?

Anyway I think it is an interesting subject. Mostly political / geopolitical in nature as it has to do with the balance between rich and poor, east and west.

We in the west must carefully weight our economic and political short term interest to our long term ones. It would do us terrible long term damage, if most of the world ends up being saved mostly by Russian or Chinese vaccines, due to the west's export controls, patent controls, narrow commercial interest.

Of course that is with the purely cynic hat on. Were we talking any sort of moral, we would have waived the vaccine patents immediately, at least in an emergency period.