• Chastity2323@midwest.social
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    10 hours ago

    This isn’t Bill’s action, it’s Bill’s inaction.

    If you had read the article, you would know that he very actively pressured Oxford not to open license the vaccine, leveraging his $750 million donation to the university for vaccine research.

    • Initiateofthevoid@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      3 hours ago

      Really? Show me where.

      It claims that he bragged about doing so, and links to another article.

      But that other article doesn’t support that claim with any evidence that he pressured them to keep their patent, that he bragged about it, or had any say in the final decision.

      We went to Oxford and said, Hey, you’re doing brilliant work,” Bill Gates told reporters on June 3, a transcript shows. “But … you really need to team up.” The comments were first reported by Bloomberg.

      AstraZeneca, one of the U.K.’s two major pharma companies, may have demanded an exclusive license in return for doing a deal, said Ken Shadlen, a professor at the London School of Economics and an authority on pharma patents—a theory supported by comments from CEO Soriot.

      "We simply don’t know what’s in these deals,” he said. “The biopharma industry is applying old rules of commercial confidentiality in a situation that is unprecedented.”

      • Chastity2323@midwest.social
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        1 hour ago

        Really? Show me where.

        It claims that he bragged about doing so

        The sentence after where it says that… You have ctrl f. Use it.

        that other article doesn’t support that claim with any evidence that he pressured them to keep their patent, that he bragged about it, or had any say in the final decision.

        Not sure what “evidence” you want… Bill Gates said it was true himself and did multiple interviews talking about it which are not hard to find. Every article I can find online says the same story - that Oxford initially planned to open license the vaccine and then Gates pressured them to change course.