So now Covid-19 vaccine research has become a secret which can be “stolen” by foreign cyber-hackers? In this case, Russian ones...

    But hang on. Just what kind of a world are we living in when even the scientific establishment talks about a “race” between competing research teams in order to be “first” to find a Covid-19 vaccine? It’s not even certain this is possible, yet huge resources have been put into the 200 or so competing projects and millions of doses have even been ordered beforehand by the world’s richest countries, in order to be ahead in the queue, thus depriving others.

    Of course, the biggest consideration in this capitalist, profit first, world, no matter the human stakes, is the big revenues for big pharmaceuticals!

    This is a sorry spectacle. And it says it all about the society we are living in - where, despite the devastation caused worldwide by this novel coronavirus - it is the value of money that talks, and not the value of human life.

    So this is the context in which we have just seen the ramping up of the government’s rhetoric against Huawei/China and the “threat” it poses, as well as the threat of “Russia” - by which they mean the Russian state.

    Did anyone ask why, if it is true that Russian hackers tried to steal research “secrets”, that they should have felt they needed to? The research data was meant to be available to all who need it! So did they perhaps suspect that they might be last in the queue for a vaccine, if it was discovered in Britain or the US?

    That would be quite understandable, given the current reactionary climate, conveniently stoked by the long-awaited (delayed 10 months!) Intelligence and Security Committee “Russia report”.

    It may not put the government in a good light. But it is a report which simply exposes that there is no evidence of the government looking for evidence... of a Russian disinformation campaign. Maybe because the government is quite good enough at promoting its own disinformation.