More shockers keep coming out of the mighty Dragon and at the centre of the controversy is the Wuhan Institute of Virology all over again, days after voices around the world called for an inquiry into the lab’s suspected role in leaking the virus. China reportedly filed a patent for a drug called Remdesivir, which the US media has been trying to project as a potential weapon against the novel Wuhan virus.
The move itself is provocative given that China tried to patent the drug without even working with the original developer, Gilead Sciences.
The Big media companies like Bloomberg, Financial Times, and Forbes are promoting this drug produced by American biotechnology major Gilead Sciences.
The drug is freshly patented and expensive, as opposed to India’s Hydroxychloroquine, which is why the American media is aggressively trying to undermine India’s generic drug HCQ and promote Gilead’s Remdesivir instead.
Anyway, the latest revelations of China trying to patent the drug that was initially developed by Gilead as a part of the fight against Ebola has sparked fresh concerns about how China might have been misleading the world about the severity of the virus with a view to extracting the maximum possible benefit out of it.
It is known that top Chinese officials were in the know of things about a likely Coronavirus Pandemic by January 14 itself, yet the Chinese President Xi Jinping had taken six days before he warned the public of the Pandemic.
On the seventh day, Jinping warned the public about the COVID-19 Pandemic and the fact that the virus was contagious in nature, that is, the dreaded human-to-human transmission was taking place. But by that time Wuhan had already become the first epicentre of a Pandemic that would later go on to infect millions and kill lakhs across the world.
Now, the latest revelations tell us that Beijing probably had far more knowledge about the severity of the virus than anyone of us would have possibly imagined. Why else would Beijing push an application for questionably patenting the drug originally designed by an American company Gilead Sciences, and is being seen as a potential weapon against Coronaviruses?
Beijing’s public stance about Coronavirus has always been such that there was always an impression of the Communist regime trying to hush up things, and downplay the number of cases and deaths. Till now, it was being seen as a ploy by China to vindicate the “Beijing consensus” and to deflect the blame for creating a massive Pandemic.
But the reports of China filing such murky patent claims reeks of an attempt to profiteer out of a crisis that China deliberately allowed the world to slip into. It seems quite plausible that Beijing knew about the severity of the Pandemic that will hit the world, and also knew how millions would get infected all along yet it remained silent.
Doctors were reprimanded when they tried to speak up against the cover-up and journalists who spoke of the novel virus disappeared mysteriously and now the dots can be connected.
Meanwhile, Gilead, the California-based developer of Remdesivir has stated that it had filed own global applications for using the drug against Coronavirus four years ago.
The American pharmaceutical firm has also revealed that it was aware the patent claim that was filed in China, but it has no control over the Patent Office’s decision, and therefore could not comment about it as the precise details of the application would not be known till next year.
China has been repeatedly trying to sidestep the outrage against it for not being able to confine the Pandemic within its territory and taking a series of catastrophic decisions that have left almost every single part of the world infected.
But Beijing would have been planning to come out looking like the world’s saviour by patenting Remdesivir as a potential weapon against COVID-19 and drawing applause for finding a solution to the deadly virus.
China wants us to believe that it took the Chinese government six days from January 14 to January 20 to decide whether the virus is contagious in nature or not. But somehow it developed such deep understanding of the outbreak, between January 20 and 21, that it went ahead patenting a drug for its potential use against the Wuhan infection.
China is infamous for Intellectual Property theft, an angle which too must be explored given that Gilead has now claimed that it had already filed an application for a global patent four years ago insofar the use of Remdesivir against Coronavirus is concerned.
Beijing has a lot of tough questions to answer now. This single development strongly suggests that the Coronavirus Pandemic is not a result of Chinese negligence, rather it is a result of China’s incessant need to profiteer out of a deadly Pandemic.
