Different Takes: A Kid’s Opinion On The Vaccine; Will Pharma Be Forced To Share Secrets?

CNN: I'm 12 Years Old And Here's Why I Got The Covid Vaccination 
I'm 12 and I've gotten my first Covid-19 vaccine dose. And this is what I'd like to tell my friends: I was a new sixth grader to our school last year. Looking forward to new friends, play dates on the basketball court and sleepovers, instead we got remote learning; classes where many of us had video screens turned off because we had just woken up and were embarrassed to share our bed head; endless socializing over Roblox and Fortnite, where we knew each other by screen names only. Now don't get me wrong, I love a good video game, but maybe I'd like to know what your real skin looks like -- rather than your Fortnite "skin." (Rai Goyal, 6/1)

The Boston Globe: Pharma’s Secrecy Hinders Global COVID-19 Vaccination. Joe Biden Could Fix That. 
At the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, we were told that we were all in this together. From Cape Town to California, leaders preached the virtue of solidarity. Now the United States has opened vaccine eligibility to all adults, while the rest of the world lags months — and even years — behind. Rich countries are vaccinating their people 25 times faster than poorer nations. Why are COVID-19 vaccines scarce? One critical reason is secrecy. Pharmaceutical corporations fiercely guard their COVID-19 vaccine recipes as trade secrets — despite receiving billions in taxpayer funding to come up with those recipes. (Christopher Morten, Christian Antonio Urrutia, and Zain Rizvi, 6/1)

The New York Times: Could Spilling Big Pharma’s Secrets Vaccinate The World? 
Just 12.5 percent of the world has been inoculated against Covid-19. To protect every country from the pandemic, regardless of economic level, there are many approaches global leaders could take. But they have to act fast. In this state of planetary emergency, should pharmaceutical companies that make vaccines be forced to break their patents? Is that the best or fastest way to get lower-income countries to catch up with vaccination rates? Weighing the pros and cons of a vaccine intellectual property waiver with Jane Coaston this week is Rachel Silverman, a policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, and Tahir Amin, a co-founder and co-executive director of I-MAK, the Initiative for Medicines, Access & Knowledge. (6/2)

USA Today: Some Evangelicals Spread Falsehoods About COVID Vaccines While The World Is Desperate
On a recent call with more than a dozen global evangelical leaders, and after hearing reports from and Indian leader, I mentioned that one of my recent social media posts on vaccines had provoked a strong (and mostly negative) reaction. One of the leaders on the call echoed the view of the group: He couldn't understand the attitude among Christians. Neither can I. The idea that some evangelicals are spreading misinformation about the vaccines while the majority of the world is desperate for them is hard to understand. Yet, we have to understand it to address it. Evangelical Christians need to be part of the solution, not part of the problem, as we all work to end the greatest global crisis of our lifetime. (Ed Stetzer, 6/2)

The Atlantic: A Conversation With NIH's Francis Collins 
As Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, recounted the moment, his eyes welled with tears. A few months before, he and his colleague Anthony Fauci had confided in each other their hopes for a COVID-19 vaccine. The FDA had set the threshold for approval at 50 percent efficacy, roughly what the flu vaccine achieves each year. They would have been quite happy to hit 70 percent. (Peter Wehner, 6/2)