Like I said, it's not about retroactively deciding they should have ramped up production in hopes of future payoffs. This is about a constitutional issue: At t

Like I said, it's not about retroactively deciding they should have ramped up production in hopes of future payoffs. This is about a constitutional issue: At this moment (or rather last week), Roche was using a "legal" loophole to keep these states from testing. This is unethical, clearly, and leads to deaths. Now the question is: why is it a loophole? Is it illegal if there is no law against it? On the surface, Roche is just doing what is in its best interests. But my point was that in the EU, many systems are explicitly not set up solely as "do what you want if there is no law AGAINST it"! I made the case that this behavior (lock-ins of whatever form to keep hospitals from testing patients) is in fact not consistent with the entirety of our laws, and the only issue here is the difficulty of determining this fact in a short timeframe because constitutional / public law does not directly (however indirectly) legislate private parties. In particular, in our jurisdiction, we norm (for example in the constitution) that commerce has to fall within ethical boundaries. Sometime these norms are made concrete as laws: price gouging, for example, is illegal. For this case, no such concrete law exists. Nevertheless if this was ever brought in from of a court, the court would decide without fail that this behavior is not in accordance to the basic law of the constitution and it would in fact mandate the legislative to form a new law forbidding this behavior (where the boundaries were to be set by weighting countervailing interests of private commerce against public welfare). This is absolutely standard legal procedure. Similarly, executive bodies would eventually (see the EC) step in, and their decisions would ex-post be validated by the constitutional courts, without fail. Because one law that does exists in most countries, coming from the above constitutional consideration, is that the executive can expropriate private parties if it is in the overwhelming public interest. This is simply a law that writes down what our constitution proclaims in terms of ethical behavior. So, the only reason this loophole exist, then, is because executive bodies are slow to react, and court validation is even slower. Hence, my point was that Roche was using a loophole within our legal system to engage in unethical behavior. Whether or not this alone is illegal, and whether or not there will be sanctions, is doubtful, as public law of this kind does not directly legislate private businesses. But I would like to see laws enacted now that norm (even if it needs to be specific such as for pandemic cases) that when a private party engages in behavior that is unethical or otherwise obviously not consistent with basic principles, then they can be retroactively punished. All this is very simple: Most countries in the EU have a legal basis that unethical behavior, such as endangering lives, is not justifiable by business interests. Everyone doing business here has to be aware of this and we have to conclude that Roche was doing this despite this knowledge.