Healthcare advocates on Thursday welcomed a pledge from presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden to share any potential Covid-19 vaccine with the rest of the world if elected, calling it an important "step in the right direction" that must be followed up with a substantive plan to reverse President Donald Trump's "America First" approach to the global pandemic.
"Covid-19 technologies must be treated by the U.S. and all nations as global public goods," said Emily Sanderson, an organizer with Health GAP, an international advocacy group dedicated to expanding global access to medicine.
"Hoarding, nationalism, pushing people in low-, middle-income, and other upper-middle income countries to the back of the line, blocking healthcare workers' access to life-saving personal protective equipment, and buying up supplies of current and prospective treatments is a losing prescription for the American people," Sanderson said.
"All candidates and elected officials should strongly affirm their support for and commitment to global health policies that advance the right to health for people in the U.S. and around the world," Sanderson continued.
In an interview Wednesday with Medicare for All advocate Ady Barkan, Biden condemned Trump's withdrawal of the U.S. from the World Health Organization and committed to share any Covid-19 vaccine with the international community if elected president.
"This is the only humane thing in the world to do," Biden said. "Were I president now, and I propose we do it now, set aside $25 billion to put together a plan now—now, this instant—how we will distribute that vaccine when it's made available, to guarantee it gets to every American and access is made available to the rest of the world."
"This guy's whole idea of America, America on its own, has meant America alone," Biden added. "It lacks any human dignity what we're doing."
On June 29, as Common Dreams reported, the Trump administration announced a deal with pharmaceutical giant Gilead to purchase nearly the company's entire stock of Covid-19 treatment remdesivir.
Critics around the world warned that the move may have offered a preview of White House behavior should the U.S. become the first nation with access to a coronavirus vaccine.
Brook Baker, a professor of law at Northeastern University and senior policy analyst with Health GAP, said in a statement that the U.S. "must learn the lessons from the global AIDS pandemic, where Big Pharma's price gouging and obstruction of cost-cutting generic competition resulted in countless preventable deaths in the global South, particularly in countries in sub-Saharan Africa."
Baker urged Biden to put forth "a concrete plan to dismantle the misguided, dangerous current policy of 'America first, everyone else to the back of the queue.'"
"Biden must also show how he will overcome patent and other drug company monopolies to ensure adequate supplies of affordable vaccines both in the U.S. and around the world," said Baker.
"Aggressively expanding manufacturing capacity to meet emergency needs should not be left to the companies—there should be full technology transfer to all capable manufacturers globally so that the world can collectively end this plague sooner rather than later," Baker added.
This article was originally published by Common Dreams.
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Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.