So apparently China wants to steal the Coronavirus vaccine! Russia probably does too! How dare they! Don’t they know that some pharmaceutical corporation is supposed to make an infinite amount of dollars from that patent? With that infinite amount of money, the shareholders of whatever company succeeds first will gain a significant amount of millions of dollars to their already many millions of dollars! It would be an absolute crime to allow the people of China or Russia to survive the pandemic; heaven forbid, they could even release that information world-wide and then everyone would have the opportunity to cheaply manufacture whatever vaccine is produced! It is such a heinous crime, it is like a reverse-holocaust: millions of people would be relieved of arbitrary and pointless suffering and death, rather than being exposed to it. Obviously, we must put a stop to this.
All sarcasm aside, what in the actual fuck? How can media organizations criticize China’s delay in releasing the virus’s genome while allowing the privatization of vaccine data to go unchallenged? Would it have been better if China had held on to that genome indefinitely, giving them a market advantage to develop a vaccine before the West? Surely those in the West would have graciously accepted that capitalist doctrine. It was China’s decision to delay in order to save face that was the grave error. Rational people don’t care about face if millions of people might die; rational people care about money even if it means millions of people might die. Oh God, the sarcasm came back!
Blame China for the delay or scapegoated them for the delayed response many Western countries delivered? Neighbouring Asian countries seemed to have enough time to respond appropriately
I have previously written about copyright laws, but this is ridiculous to the point of needing to repeat myself. An argument could be made that pharmaceutical companies need a patent in order to recoup the huge startup costs that it took to develop whatever they end up producing, and to count against the risk of producing a failed product. But what about the risk of all the essential grocery store workers who labored at minimum wage to ensure those heroic pharmacologists could eat? Or of the truck drivers and migrant farmers who made sure those shelves were stocked? Society kept functioning because of the sacrifices of so many who barely scrape by. Do they not deserve consideration? Should they have to pay a fee to protect themselves from a virus they’ve been supporting us through this entire time? It’s especially egregious since those most able to afford a profit-driven vaccine are those most loftily enduring this from the sidelines. Or how about how none of this research would have been possible had China not release that genome data in the first place. Is China not thus entitled to a little corporate espionage as recompense? Clearly humanity in its essence is not a good enough motivation; there must be market share.
It is incomprehensible that vaccine data is not being openly shared worldwide. On such a global scale of community impact, any resolution that is not global in its outreach is nothing short of treasonous. Treasonous not to any nation or state, but treasonous to the human population as a whole. All of us have risked. All of us have contributed. Yet only a few of us are entitled to survive?
Blog for Chumps 
I am sure China and Russia are freely sharing their research into a vaccine with the rest of the world and if they develop one first will distribute without charge because they have no interest in profit or power over the rest of us. Just ask many of their citizens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
When you’ve lived through enough ends of the world, you start to see the argument-from-doomsday for what it is.
Everyone is selfish and greedy. Some are rational about it. Some are irrational about it. And some are in denial about it. Me, I’d care a lot more about those millions of people on the other side of the world if those people cared more about me.
And I’d be more inclined to embrace the latest moral panic if the ones telling us to panic looked more scared themselves. Instead, I see them on TV and they’re practically smirking. What’s up with that?