Hacking the cure

Jul 22, 2020

There has been a lot of press recently about Russian attempts to hack British, American and Canadian research on Covid-19. Presumably, they want to steal our secrets related to cures and vaccines. The first question this brings to my mind is “Why are they secrets?” Covid-19 is a pandemic. It affects and infects people all around the world. It will not be defeated until it has been defeated everywhere. Surely, a best strategy is to share knowledge and technology so that everyone has access to solutions as soon as they are available – anywhere.

So, why the secrecy? Is there profit in the solutions? This would mean there’s profit in the disease and that makes me suspect the motives of our leaders. Surely our governments would not condone hiding something that could benefit all of mankind. This is not what Banting did with insulin or Fleming with penicillin. Maybe I’m over-reacting but I’ll say this, “If the Russians are first to come up with a good vaccine for Covid-19, I hope they don’t have some hot-shot computer programmer guarding the gateway to their database.” No sir! I want one of our own hot-shot programmers feeding information to the doctors who build our vaccines.