"Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Moderna reported $4.7 billion in second-quarter sales—a 9% increase over the same period last year—despite taking a nearly half-billion-dollar hit for write-downs on expired or soon-to-expire vaccine doses. Nearly all of the company's revenue came from sales of its Covid-19 vaccine, its only product on the market—and one whose development was funded entirely by U.S. taxpayers and contributions from private donors.
CNBC reports Moderna is also sitting atop an $18 billion cash pile, and intends to buy back $3 billion worth of its own stock. Furthermore, the company last week announced a $1.74 billion agreement with the U.S. government to supply up to 300 million doses of an updated Covid-19 vaccine for use against the omicron BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants.
'Moderna's Covid-19 vaccine was developed totally by public funding. Yet the company has been allowed to make huge profits while doing next to nothing to ensure equitable access for people in lower-income countries,' Mohga Kamal-Yanni, policy co-lead for the People's Vaccine Alliance, said Wednesday. 'For the company's newly created billionaires, this pandemic has been a lucrative smash-and-grab operation.' "
-->Smash and grab is how most giant corporations act in our neoliberal age. But this seems egregious even for this billionaire era. And what about all those who claim that vaccinations are nothing but a hoax? Won't they love this expose? But can't anti-vaxxers hold two concepts in their heads at the same time? The vaccine companies are greedy, and the vaccine works. Not that complicated, really. The NYT was missing in action on this story.
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Common Dreams:
"No Excuse for NPR's Distorted History of US Invasion of Afghanistan. NPR should present a clearer picture of historical events to provide proper context for their listeners, and to avoid legitimizing the ongoing, massively destructive policies of the United States by promoting official state mythology.
In the first part of a series of reports on Afghanistan, NPR host Steve Inskeep (Morning Edition, 8/5/22) interviewed current Afghan Defense Minister Mohammad Yaqoob Mujahid. In introducing Yaqoob on air, Inskeep referenced Yaqoob's father, the former head of the Taliban, Mullah Muhammad Omar: 'He was the leader who refused to turn over Osama bin Laden in 2001, a refusal that led to the U.S. attack.'
In the online version of the article, NPR wrote: 'Omar also sheltered Osama bin Laden, and refused to turn over the Al Qaeda leader when the United States demanded him after 9/11.'
This line that the Taliban 'refused to turn over Osama bin Laden,' and that this 'led to the US attack,' though part of the commonly accepted chronology of the war, is a gross distortion of history. The truth is almost the exact opposite: The Taliban repeatedly offered to give up Bin Laden, only rejecting George W. Bush's demands for immediate and unconditional acquiescence without discussion."
-->Still lying about Afghanistan after all these years. Shame on NPR for refusing to tell the truth about the US invasion of Afghanistan. The story wasn't a mistake; it was Pentagon misinformation. Perhaps NPR is getting ready for our next war against Russia.
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Common Dreams:
"More than 70 economists and other academic experts sent a letter to U.S. President Joe Biden and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Wednesday urging them to allow Afghanistan's central bank to access the foreign exchange reserves frozen by Washington and to persuade other governments to lift the 'coercive economic restrictions' that are exacerbating the suffering of the Afghan people.
'We are deeply concerned by the compounding economic and humanitarian catastrophes unfolding in Afghanistan, and, in particular, by the role of U.S. policy in driving them,' states the letter, which was signed by 71 leading intellectuals including Jayati Ghosh, Heidi Shierholz, Yanis Varoufakis, and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, among others.
The letter implores Biden and Yellen 'to take immediate action to confront this crisis, above all by allowing the central bank of Afghanistan, Da Afghanistan Bank (DAB), to reclaim its international reserves.'
Just a few months after the U.S. military withdrew from Afghanistan last August and the Taliban regained power following two decades of war that killed hundreds of thousands of people and cost trillions of dollars, Biden commandeered $7 billion worth of DAB assets held at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, putting millions of people in the poverty-stricken country on the verge of starvation."
-->We destroyed Afghanistan militarily, and now we won't give them their gold when the country is facing a famine. A famine that was the result of our occupation. How is this different from the tens of millions who starved in India under British colonial rule? The NYT didn't cover this story.
