F%$# Howard Dean

I campaigned for Howard Dean in 2004. 

In 2006, as head of the DNC, he organized the 50 state strategy, which devolved money and power to local organizers, and won back the house and Senate. 

Then he got kicked to the curb by Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel, and he decided to start lobbying.

I was disappointed, but now I'm just sick and tired of his crap.

The doctor who came closest to the Presidency in at least the past 20 years, is now shilling for big pharma at the costs of many thousands of lives in 3rd world countries. 

His impassioned defense of big pharma looting through the use of patent subsidies just lost me.

I guess that there are 3 kinds of politicians in the United States:

• Sell-outs.
• Those who will sell-out one day.
• Bernie Sanders.

To quote God, "It's like those miserable Psalms — they're so depressing."

Howard Dean, the former progressive champion, is calling on President Joe Biden to reject a special intellectual property waiver that would allow low-cost, generic coronavirus vaccines to be produced to meet the needs of low-income countries. Currently, a small number of companies hold the formulas for the Covid-19 vaccines, limiting distribution to many parts of the world.

“IP protections aren’t the cause of vaccination delays,” Dean claimed in a column for Barron’s last month. “Every drug manufacturing facility on the planet that’s capable of churning out Covid-19 shots is already doing so.”

This is flat out not true, and he knows it.

“Creating a new medicine is a costly proposition,” wrote Dean. “Companies would never invest hundreds of millions in research and development if rivals could simply copy their drug formulas and create knockoffs.”

The drug companies did not, "Invest hundreds of millions in research and development," we the taxpayers did.

His lying about this serves no one but his corporate clients.

Many of the manufacturing plants prepared to mass produce low-cost vaccines are centered in India, which has committed to supplying the poorest countries in the world. But the waiver petition, Dean wrote, “is unreasonable and disingenuous; it’s a ruse to benefit India’s own industry at the expense of patients everywhere. President Biden would be wise to reject it.”

The strident opposition to the waiver, which is supported by an international coalition of human rights organizations as well as a growing cohort of congressional Democrats, may surprise Dean’s liberal supporters. But while Dean boasts a long history of support for single-payer health insurance coverage and government intervention into lowering domestic drug prices, he has reversed his positions on virtually every major progressive health policy issue since moving to work in the world of corporate influence peddling.

………

Despite publicly funded research and huge infusions of government cash for the development and delivery of vaccines, drugmakers have carefully guarded their monopoly on the intellectual property rights and signaled to investors that they plan to soon hike prices. The pharmaceutical industry, including representatives of Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson, have pushed the Biden administration to oppose the intellectual property waiver petition and go further to even impose sanctions on any country that moves to manufacture vaccines without their express permission.

………

In another recent column, again reflecting the interests of drugmakers, Dean wrote in favor of a last-minute regulation proposed by the Trump administration to narrow the government’s ability to lower the prices of certain pharmaceutical products financed with public money, a rule that could stifle any future attempt to rein in the costs of coronavirus vaccines.

………

“He sorts of pops up whenever you argue against anything that would lower drug prices,” said James Love, director of Knowledge Ecology International, a nonprofit that works to reform intellectual property rights to expand access to medicine.

“It’s appalling because he’s introduced as a progressive; he still gets on ‘Rachel Maddow,’” said Love. “But he’s on the payroll. He’s not a registered lobbyist — he somehow finds a way not to register — but he’s sort of an influencer, he’s paid to influence the debate.”

Another part of my misspent middle age (I was 42 in 2004) is destroyed.

Seriously, Dr. Dean, go back to Vermont, and shut the f%$# up.