Trump offers 'large sums' for exclusive access to coronavirus vaccine

While we should absolutely be throwing resources at capable scientists now, attempting to purchase exclusivity rather than maximizing availability by freely distributing validated knowledge as widely as possible is precisely the wrong approach. If this story is true, it suggests that the administration's response to an acute human crisis is to consolidate power at any cost. Whether such a policy is driven by fear or avarice is secondary to the fact of its aggressively zero-sum nature.

This is a really misleading title. The evidence here is extremely thin, and The Guardian has no actual source, just reports from _Die Welt_ that themselves claim only an anonymous source.<p>I suggest something more like: “Anonymous German source claims that Trump offered…”. It&#x27;s a lot less misleading, and a lot less interesting.