I agree that public research should be publicly available, and Covid research in particular, but having worked in biomedicine, I also know that making data avai

I agree that public research should be publicly available, and Covid research in particular, but having worked in biomedicine, I also know that making data available to, and consumable by, everyone else takes actual work and dedicated resources, and most of the time when the data aren't easily downloadable it's usually not because someone doesn't want to share, but because they have other work to do and are possibly still collecting data. Unfortunately some of those resources now have to be spent recovering from a hacking attempt instead of actual science. Speaking as an American, I would prefer that the CIA and NSA please NOT hack Covid vaccine research in other countries based on stupid assumptions. Again, to deflect the obvious misstatements of how IP actually works, anyone who wants to sell a vaccine to the world will need to produce large amounts of data and presumably a formal patent which will actually document how it is made. How the licensing actually shakes out is a complicated question and will no doubt be as acrimonious as everyone expects, but as long as we're at the early stages these arguments are a waste of time and effort. Get the vaccine(s) working, do it right, do it without fing over the rest of the world, then* worry about whether IP rights or excessive secrecy are holding us back.