[Shannow]

This week's New Scientist pointed to the tamiflu fiasco, and that roche held the patent. Would take them over two years just to manufacture the back-orders that they have at the moment, and that's nothing like the Govts are talking about.

(given that they cannot make any more, and thus no more profit...my thoughts) they have this week bowed to world pressure, and opened up franchises (licencing) to the other big pjarma companies, to allow increased production to meet the crisis.

Nice of them, isn't it.

BTW, the original raw material for tamiflu is star anise, and it's processed from there. That's what fixed the high initial price.

naturally, it's now grown on GM bacteria, and much less costly to make.

It's an incredible distribution of taxpayer money into the pockets of the rich.

BTW, guess which country holds more tamiflu per head of population in their Government repositories ?