A few days later, Baker published the short post Why Should Anyone Care About Paying Big Bucks for Vaccine Government Funded? by Dean Baker (Beat the Press), which put a finer point on the oligarchic and classist nature of the government funding of research for which it then grants private patents.

“[…] reporters don’t seem interested in asking questions like this when the beneficiaries of government handouts are rich people (generally white). They generally are far more concerned about a few hundred dollars that might improperly be paid out to someone on food stamps rather than the hundreds of billions that the government hands out every year with its patent and copyright monopolies. (Emphasis added.)”