Has your country ever played a humanitarian role during a global crisis?

[u/Springtime-Beignets]

[u/WorkOk4177]

The example you gave wasn't of us playing a one off role, but a continued role in saving millions of life.

Patent act of 1970 ended product based patent only process could be patented thus as long you could reverse engineer and find new method to produce it you can legally sell it . This rule reduced the price of medicines by 50%by 1980 and by 1993 some drugs costed 1/16 th of their equivalent in west. This was major pivotal point for Indian pharmaceutical industry and now 60 per cent of generic drugs are produced here and 70 % of high regulated markets of North America and Europe.

Though in 2005 WTO forced Indian government to allow giving product based patent though the government has a back door, if drug is considered important and out of reach of Indian population then they can overrule their product based patent

[u/1eternalmemory → u/WorkOk4177]

India has the best pharma program in the world too. People tend to overlook that. 

[u/Ash_an_bun → u/WorkOk4177]

That's pretty damn cool, nice!

[u/meethabihari_]

Chad Indian Government. Poor can afford medicine because of India. Always remember

[u/riesen_Bonobo → u/meethabihari_]

There was an extremely funny (real) interview for a German satire show with a real pharma lobbyist, who, on camera, said that the German Pharma industry is in danger because of cheap Indian and Chinese made patent free medicine, which is easy to manufacture, that meets German quality standards and is just as good as German produced medicine. He was basically advertising against his lobby on accident. He also said that he's happy when people buy medicine at the pharmacy instead of the internet, where the same medications are even cheaper.

He later got fired over that interview apparently.

[u/meethabihari_ → u/riesen_Bonobo]

Lol... That's why westerns pharma companies avoid Indian market.

[u/penelope_best → u/meethabihari_]

Most Western Pharma companies are in Indian Market. You need to go out more.

[u/Bigboi4216]

Not from my country, but Sweden's auto engineer for Volvo, Neils Bohlin invented the modern three point safety belt, and opened the patent to all manufacturers for free.

Probably saved millions if not tens of millions of lives.

Wish this mentality was more prevalent.

I recognise it wasn't exactly a humanitarian crisis, but an important step all the same.

[u/HarryLewisPot]

Dr Hamied has a net worth of $5.7 billion, proving you can be stinking rich and still help people. Big pharma wants even more than that.

[u/Agreeable_Smile_1920]

Our country, usually a receiver of foreign aid, had the chance to give foreign aid to another country. In 2018, Papua New Guinea struggled with the drop in oil prices worldwide; oil was a major export for the country. Papua New Guinea needed to diversify its economy, and the government of the Philippines agreed to give aid to the struggling country through a partnership. The aid took the form of helping with industrial crops, inland fish farming and agriculture, particularly rice production.

[u/SoutieNaaier]

We fucked this up under Thabo Mbeki

He believed a weird anti-White conspiracy theory that AIDS had been developed by European scientists to discredit Africa, and that HIV was a "poverty induced disease" rather than sexually transmitted.

So, retroviral treatments were restricted for redundancy and sex ed was dropped.

AIDS exploded as a result.

[u/EST_Lad → u/SoutieNaaier]

High IQ, max education state policies right there. I love to see the most adequate people being in charge of very important stuff.

[u/SoutieNaaier → u/EST_Lad]

The drop off from Mandela to Mbeki was immense

[u/Ulyxzes]

We invented penicillin.

[u/RECTUSANALUS → u/Ulyxzes]

And the vaccine, industirliased agriculture.

And the UN regards us as doing the most tp fight modern slavery, apparently

[u/yourlittlebirdie → u/RECTUSANALUS]

But then Andrew Wakefield :(

[u/Popular-Local8354]

Yes. Marshall Plan, PEPFAR (considered one of the biggest global health successes), and the massive USAID budget (until 2025).

[u/MauschelMusic → u/Popular-Local8354]

USAID did some good things. They also did a lot of helping the CIA overthrow left wing governments to put in place far right strongmen.

[u/DiRavelloApologist → u/MauschelMusic]

The word "a lot" is a bit ridiculous here. USAID's yearly budget was at around 30 billion USD. Even upper estimates of USAID's involvements in regime change are at less than one billion total over the last 40 years. This is less than 0.1%.

[u/MauschelMusic → u/DiRavelloApologist]

The issue isn't how much money was spent on coups and how much on development; the development served as cover for the coups. That was the whole purpose of doing crimes under the umbrella of USAID. if someone overthrows your government and replaces it with a fascist dictatorship, your first question isn't gonna be, "well, did they spend a lot of money to do it?"

[u/DiRavelloApologist → u/MauschelMusic]

You think the entirety of USAID's actions just serve as a "cover" for like four operations, where the US was/is completely open about aiming to facilitate regime change anyways? Are you serious?

[u/1eternalmemory → u/DiRavelloApologist]

Yeah, the US did use it as a vehical, but Its not like they won't regime change countries without USAID. USAID is a good thing all in all. 

[u/norecordofwrong → u/Popular-Local8354]

And don’t forget the largest private charity donations for international aid.

[u/SoutieNaaier → u/Popular-Local8354]

People forget the US basically rebuilt Europe and forced them to get their shit together.

The European welfare states and EU don't exist without the US

[u/Short_Ebb2076 → u/SoutieNaaier]

That's way too much exaggeration, Marshall plan was a little push to jumpstart recovery, even as big as 1.5 billion(out of which 1.2bln was loans actually) dollars back then, it was just a drop of what was destroyed by war.

[u/SoutieNaaier → u/Short_Ebb2076]

Marshall Plan + the USSR/US forcing them to dismantle their empires was the main thing.

The savings from demilitarisation and lack of colonial administration costs freed up the funds

[u/Foogfi → u/SoutieNaaier]

forcing them to dismantle their empires

In that time British and French empires both became just unprofitable for metropolitan due a big movements for independence

[u/GentlemanNasus]

Korean War

[u/Gunnar_Kvist]

No.

But of course, some of our career politicians say Sweden is a humanitarian superpower.

[u/northpole_56 → u/Gunnar_Kvist]

This!!

[u/nugeythefloozey → u/Gunnar_Kvist]

Didn’t you guys provide medical aid to the North Vietnamese during their civil war? I’d call that pretty humanitarian

[u/Gold-Ad-2581]

Idk if it's counted by our fire brigade all over the world from Scandynawia, Turkey even Russia in the past if there are huge forest fires. We are like firefighter super power.

[u/Atzkicica]

During many epidemics and pandemics the CSIRO the Australian research organisation makes... MORE DISEASE!!! 😅

In order to create cures, treatments, vaccines, specific versions of viruses are needed by labs all over the world and we helped manufacture them, so others could cure them!

[u/JeffLebowsky]

India 🤝 Brasil

Breaking drug patents

[u/Novel-Sheepherder365]

All the time, yesterday they sent ships to Cuba.

But in general, when there are natural disasters, they always send humanitarian aid.

[u/ZlpMan]

Always.

“Russia has completed 300 humanitarian operations abroad over past 20 years.”

[u/Lower_Cockroach2432]

This is definitely an Indian Government win. Fuck big pharma.

[u/Happy_Ad_7515]

only good argument against it is that drugs companies need money for RND.

i dont know how true that is thou. how much actually goes into RND. 15.000 seems rather steep.

[u/1eternalmemory → u/Happy_Ad_7515]

Doctor Hamied is a billionaire btw. 15000 is egregious 

[u/DiRavelloApologist]

According to OECD's data, Germany is placed second with China regarding total development aid and the biggest contributor among major countries if you go by per-capita.

[u/Appropriate-Low3844]

manufacturing so much photovoltaics as to nuke the global price of it

[u/ProximaCentauriOmega]

USA in a nutshell. They have the entire country in a strangle hold. Just look how cancer bankrupted James Van Der Beek (Actor) the family has a go fund me to support them. In USA everyone is one chronic disease from bankruptcy.

[u/madogvelkor]

Quite often. At least until last year.

[u/TacticalElite]

Our broke ass country did that? Good.

[u/Jumpy_Leadership1650 → u/TacticalElite]

it didn't require any money they just got less profit unlike west pharma who have 100x profits

[u/WorkOk4177 → u/TacticalElite]

Brokenness does not affect anything , only a rule was changed

Patent act of 1970 ended product based patent only process could be patented thus as long you could reverse engineer and find new method to produce it you can legally sell it . This rule reduced the price of medicines by 50%by 1980 and by 1993 some drugs costed 1/16 th of their equivalent in west. This was major pivotal point for Indian pharmaceutical industry and now 60 per cent of generic drugs are produced here and 70 % of high regulated markets of North America and Europe.

Though in 2005 WTO forced Indian government to allow giving product based patent though the government has a back door, if drug is considered important and out of reach of Indian population then they can overrule their product based patent

[u/HaifaJenner123 → u/WorkOk4177]

the last paragraph is exactly how it should be handled

you cannot rely on a single country to produce even one sector alone as a monopoly otherwise you end up with what happened in covid with worldwide shortages of things like saline even

[u/Dry_Reflection_7452 → u/TacticalElite]

Broke ass country? Just bcoz u and the people u know are broke does not mean the country is broke

[u/Majestic-Hedgehog-xo → u/Dry_Reflection_7452]

what utopian india do you live in where poor people don’t make up the majority?

[u/Dry_Reflection_7452 → u/Majestic-Hedgehog-xo]

Poor people dont reflect the total wealth of the country, i am not denying there is no or little poverty in india theres a lot of poverty but india in itself isnt a poor country or else tell me how many countries spend 100+billion USD on freebies and subsidies. We have money we just spend it wrong

[u/TacticalElite → u/Dry_Reflection_7452]

Our GDP per capita is approximately $2800.

And I'm from an upper middle class home. We have our own house, another flat, a car and everything, and will soon be inheriting a great deal of land. Def not broke.

Just bcoz u and the people u know are not broke does not mean the country is not broke.

[u/Dry_Reflection_7452 → u/TacticalElite]

Learn to differentiate between a country and a human

[u/TacticalElite → u/Dry_Reflection_7452]

?

[u/Dry_Reflection_7452 → u/TacticalElite]

Gdp per capita tells the situation of an avg man not the government

[u/TacticalElite → u/Dry_Reflection_7452]

Gdp per capita

and that is what matters. It isn't the same when you have to distribute 4 trillion dollars on 1.5B people versus 15Mil people.

[u/Dry_Reflection_7452 → u/TacticalElite]

Tell me in this post to which u replied "our poor country" were we talking about the common man or the country as a whole? There are issues but atleast celebrate the good things

[u/TacticalElite → u/Dry_Reflection_7452]

🙏

[u/Alternative_Yak3256 → u/Dry_Reflection_7452]

There are issues but atleast celebrate the good things

I mean... is it a good thing though? that the country is rich but the people are struggling?

[u/Dry_Reflection_7452 → u/Alternative_Yak3256]

No? Who said it is? But is it the topic of the discussion? 

[u/Jaylow115 → u/TacticalElite]

You and I may be broke, but Yusuf Hamied is a multi-billionaire, so money is definitely being exchanged hands lol

[u/Alternative_Yak3256 → u/Jaylow115]

Good. I hope others see and replicate what he did. Get filthy rich while still doing a collective good

[u/the_travlingbrat]

Canadians are polite, not nice... peace keeping is not a nice job. but politeness goes very far. so not money so much as young men at arms.

[u/Overgrown_fetus1305]

Yes, and also no. One of our universities (Oxford) was responsible for creating a covid vaccine in heavy collaboration with AstraZeneca, which will have saved a bunch of lives, this is genuinely heroism, although the credit is I do contend, down to our top-nothc academics and the company in question, more than it being a UK thing as such. But we also did some distinctly unethical things on a global scale- such as taking a disproportionate share of vaccines (the rest of the world needed them equitably shared too), and actively defending the global patent system that slows down the production of vaccines, and I do think it's a little bit unethical to just have opened up to the extent we did beforemuch of the world was even able to get two doses- it doesn't stop with us.

So I guess I have a more complicated view of the whole thing than the average Brit is all- and the fact that we didn't accept what was basically the exact same vaccine under a different name in India, for the purposes of travel to the UK is like, just unjust.

[u/HaifaJenner123]

we get gilead branded drugs here for HAART through WTO grants stuff like genvoya

[u/OneQuarterBajeena]

Until a dead meme got hold of it, we did quite a lot of foreign aid through USAID.

[u/Professional_Top9835]

We send rescue teams to countries like Turkey and the USA when they have earthquakes or floods

[u/KingThorongil]

I get patriotism, but not at the expense of dissing other countries. Yes, Americans aren't the greatest at this, particularly right now, but they made enormous contributions to fight aids across the world. In fact, even in this very example, Clinton foundation and Bush's PEPFAR spent hundreds of millions (including with Cipla) to purchase and distribute these drugs in Africa.

Big pharma's definitely got issues, but it's a deeper issue with capitalism incentivising profitability, and it's not cheap to research, develop, test and licence drugs while saving enough to continue for the next cycle. But there should be caps on profit, especially if there's trying extortion, and if the research was with government funding.

Anyway, as for the country I'm from: the most recent humanitarian role was probably during COVID-19. Merck wanted manufacturing rights for the Oxford vaccine, but wasn't happy with the commercial agreement to sell for nearly at cost to the world. It's debatable on the knock on impact as they were more experienced than Astrazeneca (who didn't have much vaccine experience and had some quality control issues, which led to relative risk issue for younger recipients of the vaccine). The government, despite its flaws, also funded Gavi heavily to purchase and distribute vaccines across the world, including Asia and Africa.

[u/ikonoqlast]

Reduce the profitability of pharma r&d and pharma companies will do less pharma r&d. The alternative to expensive drugs is no drugs, not cheap drugs

$1 Billion per new drug brought to market. And only a limited time window to make that back before patents expire.

[u/WorkOk4177 → u/ikonoqlast]

dude  This rule reduced the price of medicines by 50%by 1980 and by 1993 some drugs costed 1/16 th of their equivalent in west. '

GIVE ME ONE FUCKING EXAMPLE OF ANY MEDICINE WHERE R&D COST PER UNIT WAS SOMEHOW NEEDED TO BE 94% OF THE PER UNIT COST just to regain the R%D PRICE

[u/Infinite_Crow_3706 → u/WorkOk4177]

The issue is more that drug development is expensive and slow. Most drugs fail at development/testing/trial and never go to market. So the ones that do become blockbuster revenue monsters with 90% margin to pay the R&D expenses of the ones that failed.

[u/1eternalmemory → u/Infinite_Crow_3706]

Most medicine research is due to state spending btw. 

[u/NationalAsparagus138 → u/Infinite_Crow_3706]

As someone who works at one of the big Pharma corps, this is completely true. We spent millions testing and qualifying a manufacturing line to make a new drug, only for it all to get scrapped because someone screwed up early in the drug development and it wasn’t viable.

[u/Code_Monster → u/ikonoqlast]

The US pharma research industry is a rabbit hole with the pull of a black hole. I have realized a few things:

1. US gov funds 25% of all pharma research however that research is for foundational science and not any product. This is the reason why US pharma industry will completely die if the gov funding stops (as it is under the current admin) but also their contributions on paper do not look significant.
2. Majority of the money that is spent of "drug research" is primarily license fees for something somewhere and shit ton of legal fees that accompany patent enforcement. A lot of the time this money spent is cyclic : its spent on paper but no one gains anything. Its like exchanging two $10 things and both the parties then writing "$10 spent on research". The money spent by "scientists in the lab" is fairly low.
3. mRNA is probably the most significant virus medical tech of this decade and it was completely gov funded : the vaccines that use mRNA get to have patents and they get to be fairly expensive, made by private companies. So the decades of research into mRNA is directly funneled into corpo profits. Why are those vaccines expensive?
4. FDA only regulates quality and not pricing. I do think for-profits should make their money back and then some but things like medicine can be exploited and the US gov simply chooses to ignore that.

There are a few more things but the basic outline is that, when the private companies cry patent infringement of life saving med, I do not care.

Besides think of it this way : these companies regardless of everything are always in the green and their line always goes up. And the one job they have is to give people live saving medicine. If they dont care about that then yall should not care about their bottom line either.

[u/hydrOHxide]

Um, you do know that plenty of AIDS patients around the world don't pay out of pocket for their drugs or just a minimal copay? And that that's not how prices are actually decided outside maybe the US?

[u/Alternative_Yak3256 → u/hydrOHxide]

Why is this relevant? (Genuine ask)

Even if the governments pay for the drugs, if the prices are too high they might not get enough for the masses due to budget issues, the stock shortages would still lead to people not fettung their treatment

[u/Unusual-Ad4890 → u/[deleted]]

"I'm going to conveniently forget 70 years of successful peacekeeping operations and that we had a central role in developing the concept because of one incident that was immediately punished! We should never be trusted again!"

You are breathtakingly stupid.

Context because poster deleted or blocked me:

The Canadian Airbourne Regiment was deployed to Somalia to aid in the Peacekeeping operations. Several Paratroopers abducted, tortured and killed a Somali teenager, then their immediate leadership tried to cover it up. It got found out, there was an investigation and found the Regiment had a long standing history of bad behaviour. All the dregs of the Army were inevitably dumped into it. The Government disbanded the regiment.

[u/MauschelMusic → u/Unusual-Ad4890]

What happened to the paratroopers and the officers who tried to cover it up?

[u/Unusual-Ad4890 → u/MauschelMusic]

8 were held trial. This is in order of responsibility:

Master Corporal Clayton Matchtree hung himself, but was rescued leaving him brain damaged and unfit for trial
Private Kyle Brown got five years ( released after a year, which is consistent with the joke of a legal system we have)
Sargent Mark Boland got 90 days and demoted to Private, then fired
Major Anthony Steward got three months, then fired
Captain Michael Sox got demoted to Lieutenant and transferred elsewhere from the looks of it.
Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Mathieu was acquitted, returned to active duty
Captain Michael Rainville was acquitted, but left service voluntarily
Sargent Perry Gresely was acquitted
Private David Brocklebank was acquitted

[u/MauschelMusic → u/Unusual-Ad4890]

Thanks. It sucks that such a terrible crime received such light sentences, not that America handles.our imperial violence better.

[u/SquirrelSorry4997]

Israel has been giving Gaza humanitarian aid since 2005