Acknowledging that the mainstream media, scientists, academics, and apolitical government institutions that taxpayers fund are all right this time would seriously damage years and years of their own talking points that have attacked those institutions.

Politicians are already beginning to reopen the non-essential businesses amid the pandemic... Their rich donors are demanding that they do this in spite of the danger it will cause. so that corporations can rake in more money. Who do you think is telling the Las Vegas mayor to reopen the casinos -- the casino owners themselves. The capitalists...

... Anything to avoid acknowledging that capitalism puts business interests over human lives.

It's especially important for capitalists to obfuscate the harm capitalism causes in a time when people are finally starting to recognize this. After all, when right wing politicians and pundits told people they should sacrifice themselves for the economy, that may have opened some minds about the true cost of capitalism.

Bear in mind that none of this excuses the behavior of anyone causing genuine harm.

We have to protect ourselves from Individuals, because Individuals are the ones who will adopt misinformation into practice in dangerous ways.

This is particularly important in this case because some of the people protesting are not simply misinformed, but are actively recruiting for dangerous causes.

Nobody is congratulating anybody for their ignorance on an issue. It's simply important to recognize where this is all coming from.

It's not enough to just say COVIDIOTS. It's critical to recognize entities with more power and influence that are creating these divisions among the workers so that we can correct the public record when possible.

So that we can see them for what they are, and potentially dismantle them.

Governments around the world are taking steps to make sure that private corporations don’t use the coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to make unjustified monopoly profits. They’re doing that by ensuring that governments can override patents and issue compulsory licenses for COVID-19 related treatments, vaccines, and tools....

But in the U.S., lobbyists and lawyers for patent owners are pushing our government to move in the exact opposite direction. And they may succeed.

Last week, Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) introduced a bill that gives 10 extra years of patent rights (on top of the usual 20 years) to any “new or existing pharmaceutical, medical device, or other process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter.”

The patent rights grab, included in a bill that’s ostensibly about limiting medical lawsuits, also applies to improvements on existing technology...

... the fruits of any research into COVID-19 in the U.S. will rest on an enormous bedrock of public funding.

The third stimulus bill gave billions of dollars to research on COVID-19 therapies and vaccines, including nearly $1 billion in research money given to the National Institutes of Health, as well more than $75 million research funding to each of the National Science Foundation, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Department of Energy.

Part of the $27 billion going to the Health and Human Services Department also goes research and development of vaccines and therapeutics.

That’s all on top of the earlier $8.3 billion coronavirus bill, which authorized more than $3 billion for vaccine research.

The public has the right to benefit from that use of public research money, not see it locked up by patents.

In this case, the correct price point for a coronavirus vaccine is already clear: it should be free. When Jonas Salk created a polio vaccine, he understood it had to be owned by “the people,” and not subject to patents of any kind. Salk worked with both private and public funding to research and develop his solution to the devastating polio problem. He wasn’t opposed to profit or capitalism, but Salk understood clearly that low-cost or no-cost access to the vaccine was vital to the success of his enterprise.

We should be looking to limit, not expand, patent rights for technologies related to this health emergency.

We’ve proposed a bolder use of 28 U.S.C. 1498, which would stop patent owners who believe they have infringed patents from suing and getting injunctions on companies or nonprofit researchers working on COVID-19.

Instead, those patent owners would be limited to suing the government. Canada’s COVID-19 bill, allowing the government to step in on patent rights during the emergency, is another good example.

The government could compel companies and institutions that receive public funding to fight COVID-19 make the resulting IP widely available, using models like the Open COVID Pledge and Open COVID License. Those documents were created by a group of scientists and lawyers concerned that IP obstacles could get in the way of the fight against the disease.

Why is a huge patent giveaway even in this bill, which purports to be about limiting lawsuits against medical providers? More patents, with longer terms, will lead to more lawsuits against health care companies and workers.

And these new patents won’t be limited to traditional medical technologies. Sasse’s bill applies to patents on any “process, machine, [or] manufacture” that are used to treat COVID-19. That will surely sprawl into exactly the type of software patents that have fuzzy boundaries and tend to benefit lawyers, not inventors.

An attempt to extend patent terms may be the first attempt by patent owners to profit from the COVID-19 pandemic, but it won’t be the last.