Via Reuters:
The U.S. government is spending over $5 billion on an effort to speed up the development of new COVID-19 vaccines and treatments, a Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) spokesperson and a Biden administration official said on Monday.
The investment, dubbed “Project NextGen”* and first announced by White House and HHS officials in an interview with the Washington Post, aims to provide better protection from coronaviruses, including the one that causes COVID-19, that might become future threats.
*As a brief aside, this sort of cute nicknaming of every government agenda seems somewhat new. It’s hard to imagine a leader of yesteryear, like Abraham Lincoln, expending effort to come up with glitzy PR-originated marketing terms, like “Operation Unity” or whatever for the Civil War. He would likely have considered it beneath the dignity of the office. Does semantical engineering like this have the effect of infantilizing the public by assigning catchy, fun titles to nefarious government projects in order to assuage suspicion of them?
Continuing (emphasis added):
President Joe Biden’s administration will spend a minimum of $5 billion in collaborations with the private sector, an approach similar to that of the “Operation Warp Speed” project under former President Donald Trump that accelerated the development and distribution of vaccines in 2020.
These are not “collaborations with the private sector.” They are large-scale transfers of public money into private coffers, gifting pharmaceutical corporations (who pay it forward to politicians and bureaucrats in the form of kickbacks on the back end) with billions in taxpayer money to develop new products. Those firms then monetize the products developed using public funds, giving nothing back to the taxpayer for his investment, and, in fact, price-gouging him in the market. So, they get you both ways.
This is true fascism in the sense that Benito Mussolini meant it: the “merger of corporate and state power.”
Related: Unholy Alliance: Big Pharma Partners With NAACP to Push Public Subsidy of Weight Loss Drug
Continuing:
The infusion of a $5 billion investment, at minimum, will help catalyze scientific advancement in areas that have large public health benefits for the American people, with the goal of developing safe and effective tools for the American people.
The project, set to be based at HHS, will coordinate across the government and with the private sector on advancing a pipeline of new vaccines and treatments, the HHS spokesperson said. It will cover all phases of development from lab research and clinical trials to delivery.
None of this is necessary for the development of new medical products. The global pharmaceutical industry raked in $1.48 trillion in revenue in 2022. These companies have more than enough money to fund their own research and development. It’s a needless subsidy of one of the most profitable industries in human history.
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