Hello and welcome to a useful idiots breaking-ish news disclaimer explainer.

As you'll soon see on this very episode, Matt and I discuss Biden's pledge

to relax intellectual property rules to distribute COVID-19.

Now, when we recorded this episode, he had not yet announced his new position.

In fact, he had only dragged his feet.

Now, as I predict on the episode, if Biden wound up doing the right thing,

we would know that it was in part because of useful idiots because we kept this story in our sites.

Okay, but jokes aside, here's what happened shortly after we recorded our episode.

US trade representative Catherine Tai said in a press release,

this is a global health crisis and the extraordinary circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic

all for extraordinary measures.

The administration believes strongly in intellectual property protections,

but in service of ending this pandemic supports the waiver of those protections

for COVID-19 vaccines.

Now, I'm going to turn to friend of the show, David Sarota,

who wrote a great piece at Daily Postor.

He co-wrote it with Walker, Bragmem and Andrew Paris.

And here's what the three of them say at Daily Postor.

The declaration was widely hailed by public interest groups who feared the administration

would follow the past precedent and oppose any emergency action on patents.

However, Tai's statement was narrow.

It only mentioned COVID vaccines and avoided endorsing an existing broad waiver

...