| HN Mirror

> But, would our reaction be still the same if Guardian's headline said China or Russia did this? Probably not. Perhaps we would even talk about putting new sanctions.

Nope. There are about a billion other reasons both should be sanctioned to the point of embargo, but this isn't one. Nations have been fighting each other for resources for months now. That's to be expected in a high-demand, low-supply environment where each wants to save as many of her citizens as possible, and I wouldn't blame China or Russia for taking similar actions. For instance, I don't really blame China for having restricted exports of PPE because of greater need at home. I'd rather America get her hands on more stuff, but I'd expect any competent government to act in the interests of her citizens and so can't fault China (at least, not for this).

> I think the right move would be allowing other companies to produce enough of it. If that means financially supporting Gilead, let's do that. Then nobody has to take all the stockpile.

This is definitely a good approach, but this drug is pretty hard to make, so I'm not sure another company could just start making it easily [0]. However, Gilead has already been working with partner companies to ramp up production [1], which will allow them to benefit from all the work Gilead has put in to figuring out how to produce it at scale.

[0]: https://www.acsh.org/news/2020/03/26/problem-remdesivir-maki...

[1]: https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/30/gileads-remdesivir-has-s...