Vaccine research shouldn’t be secret | Letter

Martin Clavane on what reports about Russian hacking reveal about how the world responds to threats such as Covid-19

Reports about Russian hacking into Covid-19 research are very revealing (Russian state-sponsored hackers target Covid-19 vaccine researchers, 16 July). They raise fundamental questions about how the world should collectively respond to such existential threats to humankind.

Why is it natural that medical research into a vaccine for the Covid-19 virus should be a secret? Do the interests of big pharma come before protecting human life? Surely the world should be freely collaborating to protect humanity from a threat to all nations and people. No nation can be safe from it while any is not. What this therefore demonstrates, albeit unintentionally by those peddling the Russian threat, is that geopolitics are at the heart of their interests, and not stopping the virus.