tv Going Underground RT March 16, 2020 12:30pm-1:01pm EDT
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when i get out on the fine sign you know i want to take my son to their next meal so he can listen in hopefully bless heard screams. after it and say we're going on the ground a bit coronavirus just hours before another super tuesday to determine who might beat us president trump in november coming out of the show following in the footsteps of the american who arguably saved more lives than any other ralph nader we talked to green party co-founder and 2020 presidential candidate how he hawkins fighting for a $20.00 minimum wage and nuclear disarmament and with a vaccine for covert $1000.00 apparently over a year away we are the c.e.o. of a company at the forefront of the fight against the virus if big pharma as profit driven approach is obsolete when it comes to
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a global pandemic bus how are capitalists set to make a killing out of coronavirus all the small can we have a days going underground for us to morrow sees florida ohio illinois and arizona vote in u.s. presidential primaries but how much scope for change does saunders or biden really offer the people of the united states especially as the world faces a climate change emergency co-founder of the us green party and count these bodies front runner to be the green party presidential candidate in november how hawkins joins me now via skype from madison in wisconsin thank you so much ari for joining us before we even get to the presidential campaign your thoughts on the reported attempted suicide of a wiki leaks whistleblower chelsea manning refusing to testify against or for using to incriminate joining us on java wiki leaks currently here in london the u.n. . who's been on this show alleges that the u.s. is currently engaged in psychological torture of chelsea manning you know. this is just real cruelty. and she is guilty of being
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a whistleblower releasing documents that expose war crimes by the united states in s.y.r. your point ition or me she's been in jails 7 months now i believe they were refusing to testify to the grand jury she already serves there were years of prison for president obama becoming titian of her sentence you know i admire her courage and what she's being punished for exposing the war crimes and you know that's a crime in itself she'd be a fine a 1000 hours a day she'll never be that are in fairness bernie sanders also running for the presidential nomination friend of ember agrees with you on that says joining us on should be extradited what exactly is the need for a 3rd green party and they believe that what sanders calls his vision of democratic socialism can never really work in a democrat party as currently configured we need real solutions and the 2 major
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parties are not providing them the clout of crisis the inequality crisis we have a declining life expectancies but a working class in this country because inequality keeps going to be people are having a hard time may have to choose between rain and medical bills for example and we have a nuclear arms race you know all these treaties we got all these trees next one is the new start treaty the beginning in the next presidential term so those are issues that need to be addressed the latter issue none of the major party candidates are talking about him none of them are offering real solutions i would say bernie sanders is serious in is a green new deal which has been the green party signature issue for the last decade and he does address the inequality issue unfortunately to democrats and to the people he seems to be coming up short in the democratic primary but even if he got elected a independent party on the left like the green party would be his best allies because a. many tries the bush state medicare for are you going to run into the democratic
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leadership in congress will look to people opposed to the those members of congress elected people opposed to medicare nancy pelosi injured schumer well you know you know the. so called progress of the mainstream media will either tell you it being a russian assets like they did jill stein actually been on this show in the past for the leader of the green body and let alone that the fact is your basically going to help donald trump retain the white house in november by splitting the vote if that were the democrats are responsible for splitting new gloat the last 2 republicans have been elected after they lost the popular vote by the electoral college george bush in 2 down and down trump in 2016 and we've been giving them the answer to that dead state rank choice national popular vote and now we're in both the fact of the electoral college and the elections of the person came in 2nd in
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those 2 cases in also what is the problem of deciding to blow for the lesser evil is the greater evil when you really want to vote for somebody else bernie sanders he lost the nomination in 2016 but the issues he raised like medicare for our tuition free higher education in real climate action are now part of the real debate in the democratic party so you don't have to win artist to move to move the debate in the us we need to do well it's a great democratic exercise why the green body always do so badly then where we have a winner take all system unlike most countries that have elections their proportional representation and we have a strong tradition we have got all this party in the world what's been called the 2nd most enthusiastic capitals party in the world it's the democrats in and we have the richest party in the world the most of those years the gap was more in the world the republicans in their interest you. there are 50 people elected locally
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around the country in on a basis moving on up to state legislatures and congress why come out of retirement to run for the presidency especially when bernie sanders has up until the few days ago been the front runner to actually lead the democrat party the 1st time a socialist ever has where i am recently retired scenes are in and i was drafted by greens across the country when progress was going to the democratic party in both routed him to it you don't know where that vote is from a standard socialist or a corporate is it gives lost in the sauce example i ran for governor of new york in 2014 of 5 percent of the book governor cuomo the adopted 3 key demands of marking in benghazi want to compete for our books and there was a ban on fracking 15 our minimum wage in a family leap so there is little left it when the left goes into the democratic party it loses its independent voice and identity as an alternative just finally
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imagine cuomo the new york of course under a state of emergency because of coronavirus you do at least agree presumably with sanders that any possible corona virus vaccine should we made available free to all americans oh absolutely i mean just country has blown their response to corona virus and are trump worse than any other country we don't have to yes we're not getting respirators to people who are sick we don't have that sufficient care facilities in the 7000000 people who are uninsured or under insured indeed only want to go to the doctor because it's going to cost them too much trouble designers happy talk to start market in a back virus on we're in a real serious situation your now your organs thank you well is it even possible to distribute a free vaccine in a country like the us arguably choked by big pharmaceutical multinationals joining me now via skype from san francisco is computational immuno engineer and c.e.o. of distributed bio jacob glenville who also features in the netflix docu series.
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pandemic jake thanks for coming on so what is the latest on the search for the vaccine reports here are saying that the british government favor is a good immunity response to let the virus run through the population a little would you think of a yeah so the reason they're saying that is that there is currently no effective medicine and so they're just preparing for the inevitable that large numbers of people will get infected. if you can slow down the rate of new infections that's better than having them head all at once because if they had all at once then you overrun your hospital i say use and you know a problem people dying in the waiting rooms. with respect to where the medicines are there may be some good news in april where we have a series of anti-virals that didn't work well against people up but they may work well here and there's a major i.v. anti-virals and an anti malarial so any success on any one of those fronts gives us a work in medicine the vaccine work is going to take much longer that's going to be 12 realistically more like 18 months before there's a vaccine available it's got some hurdles we've had previous cases of vaccines
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against kind of irises that have backfired in animals and made the animals more susceptible through something called not a body dependent enhancement and in general those studies just take a long time because when you give someone a vaccine you have to give them a couple boosts and you have to wait 6 or more weeks for them to have good protective immunity that means you can't give it to patients because by the time the vaccine would do any good they'd either be cured or debt now the 3rd category are monoclonal therapeutics so that's what i am engineering here distributed bio that's sort of skipping the middleman of a vaccine in producing the anybody directly so you can give that to a patient and it can be effective within 20 minutes that's what we're working on in there some other groups also doing the same that would still be out into or at the earliest september that would be widely available but that's faster than the vaccines that some we know believe it but i understand that your desire for excess of all vaccines which obviously predates the coronavirus vaccine has arguably prevented you from getting funding why would that be. well i don't think it's prevented me from getting i would say i could have received funding i've been
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avoiding it because i want to work on. broad spectrum vaccines and i want to finish the job to ensure that the whole world gets access to them so that. makes me a little leery of working with public money or with venture capital because they're going to run counter to their goals of the largest return on the stand the u.s. military have a meet in touch with you about your research on coronavirus that's right we've been talking with darpa biden recently u.s. ammar just reached out we have a program where we're trying to short circuit a lot of the research that goes into trying to rush to make a new medicine against kobe 1000 so what we've done is gone back to these and old anti stars anybodies from 2000 to nearly 20 years ago they've been very well studied but they point at sars not of in 1000 we have it's a while why have they been so slow arguably to get in touch with it i think what happens is that when there's an outbreak like this the larger organizations have essentially lobbyists who can fly over there right away sit down and be like i give
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us the money right away where my attitude was i would rather walk softly but carry a big stick so i just launched my engineering programs i knew i could produce molecules faster and i figured that would be the right time to reach out so in this case i got a little lucky when they reached out to us because they heard about the programs if there are a preventable diseases like malaria still killing so many people around the world obviously mainstream corporate media a much more interested in coronavirus because it's affecting the developed world why do you feel that the global south and the developing nations of this world are so important in the battle with viruses of this kind. yes so you know the problem isn't that you don't have enough money for there to be a good working market for some of these supposedly neglected tropical diseases the issue is just that there's more money in cancer or right now more attention for 17 so part of my intention of our company and our mission is to go after making therapeutics against neglected tropical diseases as well as large scale diseases
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that affect everyone and just making the company small enough that we can become profitable so the big companies don't want to work on things like snakebite or they won't work as much on monday because the markets aren't as big a something they could spend their money else on elsewhere and they have to only pay for blockbusters because if you have 30000 employees then you have to survive on a metabolism of blockbusters of the us your company can't make it way but if that's so why is it do you think in fact we have the chief scientific officer of g s k one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world and why is it the big pharmaceutical companies are being approached by governments and not to small smaller companies is that a mistake being made by governments as they pour funding into the big if i was who companies yeah i think sometimes you know you talk to the you know so it's sort of like lobbying in general and yeah i would advise them to distribute those resources to the big companies because they're professionals at best but there's a reason the big companies go in and buy up small companies once they build new medicines and that is that innovation happens more easily in smaller biotechs in
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a dozen the risk adverse large scale portfolios of make a pharmaceutical i think there's sort of a there's a fallacy of economy of scale in pharmaceutical companies you know all these groups get excited they start to get 100000 employees to just the idea oh if we had a 10 times more people we could produce 10 times more jobs and that is just never proven to be true i think when you actually run induced into institutional inefficiencies brought prosy and then too much isolation of the engineering from the the governance so in general it has been the case that large farmers go in and wait for innovation happens by a tax on it by those biotechs once they reach a certain one. but maturation now i know you mentioned that the malarial zombie hiv these different type of treatments being experimented with why do you think critical to future pandemics in terms of treatment will be the animal human transmission and research into into that dynamic well that's where the new dynamics come from so. it is easy which is already circling and humans will eventually
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develop that herd immunity you mentioned where people have had some exposure to it previously and then also the longer it is he's been around more likely will have established medicines for it so the really scary pandemics are often coming out of other species so this is a very new looking virus a pathogen that we haven't experienced before and so no one really has existing adaptive immune protection that happens here with the new novel coronavirus but it also happens when there's a pandemic influenza where those are actually coming from pigs or birds and they've been shuffled up there genetically with parts of the virus that can infect humans and so it's a flu which sounds familiar but it's actually flu from another species which means not us are prepared to respond to take the health and here. thanks for having you know after the break making a killing full grown a virus amidst crisis capitalism while more and more self quarantine and major leaders paving the way for big profits from big pharma all the small coming up a bunch of going underground.
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blushes and thanks to the cheek a total morsel of each secret the host knows trying to seem you'll be set it's. not always shifting against. them into. beautiful to dos you know circle included at least. a little bit i was called but i'm commenting that in the scheme you do show a form which will leave you shall use. in the us not to the south korean users tell them not to be some foreign summed up
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for. the manufacture of the british mr west imo sure but. welcome back apollo one we have from the immunologists where the vaccine company's c.e.o. would glanville who suggested that even a big pharmaceutical companies were willing to produce a vaccine they might not be able to do so quickly enough to make a difference so why a countries like the us and the u.k. paying them so much money and it didn't is the director of global justice now and joins me now. thanks for coming back on next year in the united states why should we not expect the u.s. health care system such as as it is to respond well to the coronavirus well it's one of the most market driven health care systems in the whole world i mean it it is more expensive than any other health care system in the developed world and it
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produces the least good health outputs so you have things you know you have human development indicators the worse in the united states anywhere else in the world because it's a completely business dominated market driven system i mean corporate big corporations prey all on people's illnesses and whether you get treatment or not depends on how much money is going to your pocket and however bad it is in the united states the near liberal countries across the world face similar dilemma when it comes to corrode the virus it does not affect the 99 percent the same way as it affects the boy one percent of the world yeah i think that's an important point because people think global pandemic that's going to affect all of us is a kind of great leveler you know it could affect any one of us and of course to some degree it could but it's not the same likelihood that it's going to affect somebody who can afford able to work from home doesn't have a public facing job has good rates of sick pay and in the united states like you
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say you can afford to go and see a doctor and get a test i mean the problem is our country now as huge numbers of people on 0 hour contracts without proper rights without proper sick pay that too scared to even admit if they're feeling ill let alone be able to go and get a test and take the time off if they need to nothing in the budget that adequately addresses that here in britain no adequately no absolutely not absolutely not i mean i mean that that there are whole groups of people who essentially can't even use those kind of services migrant communities and that kind of thing. huge homelessness problems of course here in london but i mean even for people who fall into some of the new safety net that was announced yesterday it's a tiny tiny. amount of money i think people are looking for some degree of protection and that the government is interested in their welfare and to many people i think believe i think they've got good justification to that essentially the government is interested in the markets is interested in protecting business
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but isn't particularly interested in the experience of most ordinary people at this time well that was very loved the chief scientific officer he was saying that the coalition of preparedness innovations call seppi is going to be amazing. to try to tackle the growth of virus crisis what is be exactly it's a kind of a public private partnership and a not to say that it doesn't do any useful research or anything like that but in a way the very formation of this body is a proof of the failure of big pharma of the pharmaceutical industry which really is not is not fit for purpose it's completely dysfunctional it does not to do the research into the diseases that affect most of most of humanity most seriously because there's no money to be made it does not it's not done with proper chronic conditions as opposed to epidemics absolutely because if you can keep selling
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a medicine to somebody over a long period of time with a chronic illness that's how you're going to make an enormous amount of money we're facing an antibiotic apocalypse now right i mean antibiotics could become could be rendered ineffective within the next 20 years in modern medicine entirely depends upon these drugs but the pharmaceutical industry doesn't have an incentive to research these drugs because they would be back up the last option drugs that essentially wouldn't be used very much only when they're absolutely necessary in coming years when their patients are still going to be on the drugs so by the time those drugs are really coming on stream in a really necessary to humanity the patient would have expired in the corporation to make any more money out of them so it. it's not doing what it was set up to do in fact. blame is usually apportion to either the poor and vulnerable who seek a devoted treatment or the doctors and clinical commissions that are dealing out the antibiotics is not that they're not to blame no no no to talk i mean that there
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is blame to be apportioned to the over use of antibiotics and especially by agribusiness which pumps these things into into animals and completely unnecessarily simply because they're kept in such awful conditions but by and large there's no reason we don't have a new generation of antibiotics except the incentives on there you know we have a big pharmaceutical sector globally at the moment which spends more money buying its own stock back to keep its stock prices high than it does researching medicines that we all need. many many of the new breakthrough medicines are actually discovered by small operators small business is often with public money they get bought up by big pharmaceutical corporations and that's how they end up with the patrons that they then sit on the mate and profiteer from for years and years and years and we're covered it a little the bill in congress seem to have been watered down and what it should watered down does adequate justice to what happened as regards the price being able to be charged by a pharmaceutical company that produces
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a cure or vaccine for grown ups a lie or a spurt what do you make of the fact that this organization shepherds who were working with the big pharmaceutical companies they did have a commitment to make medicine affordable and that was reversed that decision in december 28 he calling it a step backwards they are only talking to m.s.f. and working with them to try to reverse that decision again because this is the whole purpose of why this was set up in the 1st place the jet is they would say we can't have limitations on charges for any drugs because it'll stop innovation is that the standard usage is of course it is which is absolute just what they say again and again and again we have to be able to we're taking massive risks we have to be able to recoup those costs when it comes to the price. of the drug that we sell it couldn't be further from the truth because actually the biggest risks in pharmaceutical research taken by us by the public purse by taxpayers' money at the innovative stage of medicine development about 2 thirds of the money that goes in is public money it drops to one 3rd a little bit
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a little bit later but then the public sector just offers this research up for development and manufacture by big pharmaceutical corporations who then make an absolute fortune on it for years and years and years to come so it's a real case of socialism for the big corporations and the rich and the free market for the rest of us and so if big pharmaceutical companies are in effect incentivize not to produce vaccines for peck pandemics given that we're in the middle of an emergency in l. . what are we supposed to do look at governments that haven't been incentivizing their vote was suitable companies to do so what we all think about cuba and not about countries with big lobbying groups for the valves i think many many such countries have indeed done things better then than we have i mean many developing countries get their get their drugs from from countries like india who have wonderful drug industries that can produce generically and that can evade some of
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this intellectual property regulation there is massive amounts of public research funding going into the creation of a vaccine for corona virus at the moment and that's a positive thing but we i mean it is public money going into it i mean shouldn't you set up your own manufacturers so you can take this stuff directly to the people who need it as a government or even a company absolutely but even short of that if you're on able to do that in the short term at least put conditions on the funding you're given to say there is no intellectual property provision that's going to allow you to profiteer from this drug for the next 20 years we've got there's no conditions on it from the british government at the moment which is a huge problem and in the united states we know that there are senators like bernie sanders of course who are pushing for these conditions to be applied but at the moment $7700000000.00 flows out conditions and this is the power of the lobby the dinners the drinks the receptions how do they have this power of are all politicians. it's a huge powerful lobby they truly have a lot of money and they use that money i mean in the united states as you know you
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can you can you can effectively by politicians and political positions through the lobbying money that you spend you know has to be expected arguably the mainstream media in nato nations aren't as concerned about preventable disease control in the global south they're not going to presumably who could say there's been an emergency for them and pandemics yes for decades in a virus is nothing new but what have you made of how they'll be able to respond to corrode of ours in the global south in developing nations given a in the polls see. conditions on privatisation of medical resources in return for world bank aid one of the problems in a lot of countries particularly sub-saharan african countries is absolutely as you say the conditionality placed on those countries by the international monetary fund and the world bank throughout the eighty's and ninety's affectively decimated any kind of public sector in those countries what we should be doing is helping those countries to build up those those health care systems and then to tax the investors
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in corporations so that they can continue running those systems into the future a bit like we did here after the after the 2nd world war unfortunately a lot of development professionals nowadays seem to spend enormous amounts of time scratching their heads and trying to work out how you can get financial markets to do that job for you. so what are the bonds pandemic bonds is made up completely make it was made it was made up but they are now real instruments that the world bank has one on advertising. well that the price is now plummeting not surprisingly but but but but essentially these bonds are something that rich investors in which countries can come by they they make a very good return for those investors in years when there is no pandemic when the pandemic is triggered then suddenly the capital in those bonds is supposed to go to provide liquidity assistance immediate assistance to those countries that need it most idea maybe of course however how do you get people to buy these bombs in the 1st place and you're going to trade in them on exchanges and of course the u.s.
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so you essentially have speculation with. a pandemic or not but they don't even work in their own terms because in order to get people to buy these things the terms have to be so favorable to the investors they have never been triggered to date despite a borrower and whatnot they have never been triggered now they probably will be triggered which means that never be used again doesn't want to invest in them again meanwhile through all these years they've not been triggered these pension funds and hedge funds and whatever in rich countries have been have been essentially being fed. interest and premiums for. these bonds money that was supposed to go into development fund supposed to be assisting low income countries from flowing into the pockets of rich investors and finally the money that will be released now will be completely and utterly insufficient to deal with what we've got any pandemic traders or indeed issue is on the program look to you more about that just finally and briefly fine print of any u.k.
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free trade deal with the european union if indeed it's even going to be published in the growth of ours i mean the thing that i'm still worried about is it seems that boris johnson's government has an absolute preference and priority for doing a trade deal with the united states rather than the european union and the reason i fear that is it will be importing this deregulated health model as well as deregulated food standards and so on into the u.k. it's a frightening situation and i mean if there's one positive you can draw from this awful and frightening situation that we're living through is that maybe people will wake up to the idea that big business does not have all the solutions that we need to keep us safe to keep us healthy to preserve our planet and all the rest of it and it did it thank you that's over the show will be back on wednesday ahead of the release of nature's annual report detailing its achievement as one of its members to be threatens war in syria and the refugee crisis that would put millions in harm's way until then join the underground by following us on you tube twitter
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facebook instagram and. the world are struggling in different ways to cope with the cold endemic and governments are taking the heat for their actions in actions well the coronavirus be a referendum on globalization. you are no fan speed you no longer a young woman in fact you are one of the last living survivors of the nazi else asked i'm aware of it. all your life. and you can never forget. was it really like to be in jail because you would never believe it was. due to as an operating cost for 3 years of growth
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and the birth of it at all seems so a lot offered by your side to make it right when i get out on the farm saw you i want to take my song to the next you so you can listen and hope for the bless your heart hurts. right now it's just and 8 pm monday nights here in moscow good evening headlining this hour u.s. stocks continue to tumble despite attempts by the federal reserve to smooth over a coronavirus in juice panic that says markets will run the globe and look to fend off free falling prices will bring you up to speed on the. other aspects with 19 infection rates increasing dramatically we are screwed we're now in slovenia and
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