Welcome to 2022 where everything is stupid and any future historians will spend their entire time describing the era with a permanent facepalm.
Medicago Inc.’s Covid-19 vaccine is poised to become the first western shot to be rejected by the World Health Organization, because of the company’s links to cigarette maker Philip Morris International Inc.
We urgently need more vaccines… so long as they don’t come from companies partly owned by tobacco companies.
“Due to its connections — it’s partially owned by Philip Morris — the process is put on hold,” Mariangela Simao, WHO’s assistant director-general for drug access, vaccines and pharmaceuticals, said at a media briefing on Wednesday. “The WHO and the UN have a very strict policy regarding engagement with the tobacco and arms industry, so it’s very likely it won’t be accepted for emergency use listing.”
So if Smith and Wesson figures out how to cure cancer, the UN will also turn down the cure.
Medicago is, presumably, not making a vaccine out of tobacco (though if it did, there would probably be a market.) Does cancel culture in medicine even make any sense? It does to WHO.
Covifenz is the world’s first plant-based Covid inoculation. It’s made from proteins, grown in plants, that look like the virus that causes Covid to the human immune system. The vaccine also uses GlaxoSmithKline Plc’s pandemic adjuvant, a substance that boosts the immune system’s response. It was jointly developed by Medicago, which is owned by Mitsubishi Chemical and Philip Morris, and Glaxo.
I have no idea if Medicago is any good or not. When I see plant-based at the supermarket, I’m primed to think ersatz or fake. But the story here is the silly double standard in which WHO wanted us to shut down society over the virus, but turns its nose up at a vaccine because it’s co-owned by a tobacco company when the number of people killed by drug companies and tobacco companies are probably not that far apart.
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