I think what’s been pushing them is the fact that there’s a global pandemic and they stand to make a lot of money from a vaccine. Trump can’t push them to do anything, they’re a private company.
Uhm, thats actually not true when it comes to American companies.
A multinational can recall any owned asset of one of its smaller owned companies at any given time.
In august , the Trump administration has been very aggressive in forcing all US based multinational pharmaceutical companies, to make sure that the vaccine was beeing developped for the US market first.
Some countries have a law that enables them to block critical technology to go abroad.
Belgium(Pfizer) and Germany (promising developments by some smaller company owned by a US multinational) have been in the news for this particulat phenomenion.
Actually, all of europa was pretty unhappy about Trump forcing this.
Same goes for the US army.
I'm working as a senior optical test engineer for a 3D metal printing company. Its parent company is US based.
All plastic (resin) based development is in the US
All Metals based development is in Leuven (belgium)
Except that the US army also wants certain parts. So we have a specific division in the US that makes 3D metal printed parts for the US army. They leech our technology, in one direction, but they got quite some huge funding
Trump's america first was quite visual in this aspect
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What's ever weirder is some random Euros also calling this socialism when they (should) know exactly what socialism is
You can literally convince some people they don't have two arms and legs when they do
In belgium we'd say
"Republicans are pretty capitalistic as it gets"
"democrats are as socialist, as our big central right party"
Actual socialism is fine if done with moderation. If not, like Belgium, it just fucking sucks to see how taxed into the ground you are and how disgusting lazy slobs live off wellfare that you provide
Oh yes we have time-unlimited wellfare