Google and Youtube are to some extent the Police of our National Conversations. Somehow they are allowed to invest privately and simultaneously put people in jail according to rules they made up themselves. What could possibly go wrong?
Senator Malcolm Roberts asking some very good questions:
Consider the ownership of vaccine makers. Alphabet owns YouTube and Google. Alphabet owns 12 per cent of Vaccitech, which created the AstraZeneca vaccine. YouTube bans videos mentioning ivermectin as a COVID treatment. Aren’t these conflicts of interest? If ivermectin was approved for COVID, what would happen to big pharma’s hundreds of billions of dollars in profits? These profits are a transfer of wealth from taxpayers to big pharma.
New business model? What if one hot drug created a market for other drugs:
Consider the vaccine maker Pfizer’s profits. It’s second quarter 2021 revenue was $19 billion, up 89 per cent. In three months, it made $4 billion profit. The European Medicines Agency discovered a definite link between Pfizer’s vaccine causing myocarditis. In September 2020, our TGA approved Pfizer’s Vyndamax drug to treat myocarditis. Our health department confirmed the AstraZeneca vaccine’s links with blood clots. Pfizer’s Eliquis drug treats blood clotting. Last quarter its sales were up 13 per cent. So are those blood clots rare? Really? In 2019 Pfizer’s Zavicefta drug was approved to ICU patients on ventilators. Is Pfizer making profits making people sick and more profit treating the sickness it caused?
Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is a tech giant with a $1.4 trillion market cap, making it the 5th most valuable company by market cap in the world.
What if public policy was controlled by people who are afraid of being put in the naughty corner by Google and Youtube?
Malcolm Roberts and Craig Kelly are fighting the good fight in Australia in Parliament. In the next election they are going to need all the help they can get.
h/t David B and a few others (I’m trying to find their names).