PTAB Harmonization Neg - Michigan 7 2024 CPSW

Neg---PTAB Harmonization---CPSW
Thanks to Andrew Yim, Asha Laskar, Faiz Fatehali, Justin Kim, Lucas Plotkin, Maanyata Srikantam, Matthew DaSilva, Miao Sun, Noah Eisenman, Norah Parampath, and Shruti Parthasarathy for their work on this file!
AT: Pharma Advantage
1NC – AT: Disease !
Disease won’t cause extinction.
Adalja 6-17-2016 [Amesh, infectious-disease physician, University of Pittsburgh; “Why Hasn't Disease Wiped out the Human Race?,” The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/06/infectious-diseases-extinction/487514/ //cpsw-ay]
In Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain, the canonical book in the disease-outbreak genre, an alien microbe threatens the human race with extinction, and humanity’s best minds are marshaled to combat the enemy organism. Fortunately, outside of fiction, there’s no reason to expect alien pathogens to wage war on the human race any time soon, and my analysis suggests that any real-life domestic microbe reaching an extinction level of threat probably is just as unlikely.
Any apocalyptic pathogen would need to possess a very special combination of two attributes. First, it would have to be so unfamiliar that no existing therapy or vaccine could be applied to it. Second, it would need to have a high and surreptitious transmissibility before symptoms occur. The first is essential because any microbe from a known class of pathogens would, by definition, have family members that could serve as models for containment and countermeasures. The second would allow the hypothetical disease to spread without being detected by even the most astute clinicians.
The three infectious diseases most likely to be considered extinction-level threats in the world today—influenza, HIV, and Ebola—don’t meet these two requirements. Influenza, for instance, despite its well-established ability to kill on a large scale, its contagiousness, and its unrivaled ability to shift and drift away from our vaccines, is still what I would call a “known unknown.” While there are many mysteries about how new flu strains emerge, from at least the time of Hippocrates, humans have been attuned to its risk. And in the modern era, a full-fledged industry of influenza preparedness exists, with effective vaccine strategies and antiviral therapies.
HIV, which has killed 39 million people over several decades, is similarly limited due to several factors. Most importantly, HIV’s dependency on blood and body fluid for transmission (similar to Ebola) requires intimate human-to-human contact, which limits contagion. Highly potent antiviral therapy allows most people to live normally with the disease, and a substantial group of the population has genetic mutations that render them impervious to infection in the first place. Lastly, simple prevention strategies such as needle exchange for injection drug users and barrier contraceptives—when available—can curtail transmission risk.
Ebola, for many of the same reasons as HIV as well as several others, also falls short of the mark. This is especially due to the fact that it spreads almost exclusively through people with easily recognizable symptoms, plus the taming of its once unfathomable 90 percent mortality rate by simple supportive care.
Beyond those three, every other known disease falls short of what seems required to wipe out humans—which is, of course, why we’re still here. And it’s not that diseases are ineffective. On the contrary, diseases’ failure to knock us out is a testament to just how resilient humans are. Part of our evolutionary heritage is our immune system, one of the most complex on the planet, even without the benefit of vaccines or the helping hand of antimicrobial drugs. This system, when viewed at a species level, can adapt to almost any enemy imaginable. Coupled to genetic variations amongst humans—which open up the possibility for a range of advantages, from imperviousness to infection to a tendency for mild symptoms—this adaptability ensures that almost any infectious disease onslaught will leave a large proportion of the population alive to rebuild, in contrast to the fictional Hollywood versions.
While the immune system’s role can never be understated, an even more powerful protector is the faculty of consciousness. Humans are not the most prolific, quickly evolving, or strongest organisms on the planet, but as Aristotle identified, humans are the rational animals—and it is this fundamental distinguishing characteristic that allows humans to form abstractions, think in principles, and plan long-range. These capacities, in turn, allow humans to modify, alter, and improve themselves and their environments. Consciousness equips us, at an individual and a species level, to make nature safe for the species through such technological marvels as antibiotics, antivirals, vaccines, and sanitation. When humans began to focus their minds on the problems posed by infectious disease, human life ceased being nasty, brutish, and short. In many ways, human consciousness became infectious diseases’ worthiest adversary.
None of this is meant to allay all fears of infectious diseases. To totally adopt a Panglossian viewpoint would be foolish—and dangerous. Humans do face countless threats from infectious diseases: witness Zika. And if not handled appropriately, severe calamity could, and will, ensue. The West African Ebola outbreak, for instance, festered for months before major efforts to bring it under control were initiated.
When it comes to infectious diseases, I’m worried about the failure of institutions to understand the full impact of outbreaks. I’m worried about countries that don’t have the infrastructure or resources to combat these outbreaks when they come. But as long as we can keep adapting, I’m not worried about the future of the human race.
XT – AT: Disease !
Immune systems and countermeasures solve.
Pappas 3-21-2023. [Stephanie, science journalist; “Will Humans Ever Go Extinct?,” Scientific American, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/will-humans-ever-go-extinct //cpsw-ay]
The end of humanity is far more likely to be brought about by multiple factors, Kemp says—a pileup of disasters. Although apocalyptic movies often turn to viruses, bacteria and fungi to wipe out huge swathes of the population, a pandemic alone probably won't drive humanity to extinction simply because the immune system is a broad and effective defense, says Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease physician and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. A pandemic could be devastating and lead to severe upheaval—the Black Death killed 30 to 50 percent of Europe's population—but it's unlikely that a pathogen would kill all of humanity, Adalja says. "Yes, an infectious disease could kill a lot of people," he says, "but then you're going to have a group [of people] that are resilient to it and survive."
Humans also have tools to fight back against a pathogen, from medical treatments to vaccines to the social-distancing measures that became familiar worldwide during the COVID pandemic, Adalja says. There is one example of a mammalian species that may have been entirely eliminated by an infectious disease, he says: the Christmas Island rat (Rattus macleari), also called Maclear's rat, an endemic island species that may have gone extinct because of the introduction of a parasite.
1NC – AT: Econ !
Decline doesn’t cause war.
Walt ’20 — Stephen; Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University and a columnist for Foreign Policy. May 13, 2020; "Will a Global Depression Trigger Another World War?"; Foreign Policy; https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/05/13/coronavirus-pandemic-depression-economy-world-war/
On balance, however, I do not think that even the extraordinary economic conditions we are witnessing today are going to have much impact on the likelihood of war. Why? First of all, if depressions were a powerful cause of war, there would be a lot more of the latter. To take one example, the United States has suffered 40 or more recessions since the country was founded, yet it has fought perhaps 20 interstate wars, most of them unrelated to the state of the economy. To paraphrase the economist Paul Samuelson’s famous quip about the stock market, if recessions were a powerful cause of war, they would have predicted “nine out of the last five (or fewer).”
Second, states do not start wars unless they believe they will win a quick and relatively cheap victory. As John Mearsheimer showed in his classic book Conventional Deterrence, national leaders avoid war when they are convinced it will be long, bloody, costly, and uncertain. To choose war, political leaders have to convince themselves they can either win a quick, cheap, and decisive victory or achieve some limited objective at low cost. Europe went to war in 1914 with each side believing it would win a rapid and easy victory, and Nazi Germany developed the strategy of blitzkrieg in order to subdue its foes as quickly and cheaply as possible. Iraq attacked Iran in 1980 because Saddam believed the Islamic Republic was in disarray and would be easy to defeat, and George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003 convinced the war would be short, successful, and pay for itself.
The fact that each of these leaders miscalculated badly does not alter the main point: No matter what a country’s economic condition might be, its leaders will not go to war unless they think they can do so quickly, cheaply, and with a reasonable probability of success.
Third, and most important, the primary motivation for most wars is the desire for security, not economic gain. For this reason, the odds of war increase when states believe the long-term balance of power may be shifting against them, when they are convinced that adversaries are unalterably hostile and cannot be accommodated, and when they are confident they can reverse the unfavorable trends and establish a secure position if they act now. The historian A.J.P. Taylor once observed that “every war between Great Powers [between 1848 and 1918] … started as a preventive war, not as a war of conquest,” and that remains true of most wars fought since then.
The bottom line: Economic conditions (i.e., a depression) may affect the broader political environment in which decisions for war or peace are made, but they are only one factor among many and rarely the most significant. Even if the COVID-19 pandemic has large, lasting, and negative effects on the world economy — as seems quite likely — it is not likely to affect the probability of war very much, especially in the short term.
XT – AT: Econ !
Completely uncorrelated with war.
Liao ’19 [Jianan Liao, Shenzhen Nanshan Foreign Language School, China. Business Cycle and War: A Literature Review and Evaluation. Advances in Economics, Business and Management Research, volume 68. Copyright 2019]
First, war can occur at any stage of expansion, crisis, recession, recovery, so it is unrealistic to assume that wars occur at any particular stage of the business cycle. On the one hand, although the domestic economic problems in the crisis/recession/depression period break out and become prominent in a short time, in fact, such challenge exists at all stages of the business cycle. When countries cannot manage to solve these problems through conventional approaches, including fiscal and monetary policies, they may resort to military expansion to achieve their goals, a theory known as Lateral Pressure. [13] Under such circumstances, even countries in the period of economic expansion are facing downward pressure on the economy and may try to solve the problem through expansion. On the other hand, although the resources required for foreign wars are huge for countries in economic depression, the decision to wage wars depends largely on the consideration of the gain and loss of wars. Even during depression, governments can raise funding for war by issuing bonds. Argentina, for example, was mired in economic stagflation before the war on the Malvinas islands (also known as the Falkland islands in the UK). In fact, many governments would dramatically increase their expenditure to stimulate the economy during the recession, and economically war is the same as these policies, so the claim that a depressed economy cannot support a war is unfounded. In addition, during the crisis period of the business cycle, which is the early stage of the economic downturn, despite the economic crisis and potential depression, the country still retains the ability to start wars based on its economic and military power. Based on the above understanding, war has the conditions and reasons for its outbreak in all stages of the business cycle.
Second, the economic origin for the outbreak of war is downward pressure on the economy rather than optimism or competition for monopoly capital, which may exist during economic recession or economic prosperity. This is due to a fact that during economic prosperity, people are also worried about a potential economic recession. Blainey pointed out that wars often occur in the economic upturn, which is caused by the optimism in people's mind [14], that is, the confidence to prevail. This interpretation linking optimism and war ignores the strength contrast between the warring parties. Not all wars are equally comprehensive, and there have always been wars of unequal strength. In such a war, one of the parties tends to have an absolute advantage, so the expectation of the outcome of the war is not directly related to the economic situation of the country. Optimism is not a major factor leading to war, but may somewhat serve as stimulation. In addition, Lenin attributed the war to competition between monopoly capital. This theory may seem plausible, but its scope of application is obviously too narrow. Lenin's theory of imperialism is only applicable to developed capitalist countries in the late stage of the development capitalism, but in reality, many wars take place among developing countries whose economies are still at their beginning stages. Therefore, the theory centered on competition among monopoly capital cannot explain most foreign wars. Moreover, even wars that occur during periods of economic expansion are likely to result from the potential expectation of economic recession, the "limits of growth" [15] faced during prosperity — a potential deficiency of market demand. So the downward pressure on the economy is the cause of war.
Decline spurs cooperation, not conflict.
Clary ’15 [Christopher; 4/25/15; Ph.D. in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, M.A. in National Security Affairs, Postdoctoral fellow, Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University; MIT Political Science Department Research Paper, “Economic Stress and International Cooperation: Evidence from International Rivalries,” https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2597712]
Do economic downturns generate pressure for diversionary conflict? Or might downturns encourage austerity and economizing behavior in foreign policy? This paper provides new evidence that economic stress is associated with conciliatory policies between strategic rivals. For states that view each other as military threats, the biggest step possible toward bilateral cooperation is to terminate the rivalry by taking political steps to manage the competition. Drawing on data from 109 distinct rival dyads since 1950, 67 of which terminated, the evidence suggests rivalries were approximately twice as likely to terminate during economic downturns than they were during periods of economic normalcy. This is true controlling for all of the main alternative explanations for peaceful relations between foes (democratic status, nuclear weapons possession, capability imbalance, common enemies, and international systemic changes), as well as many other possible confounding variables. This research questions existing theories claiming that economic downturns are associated with diversionary war, and instead argues that in certain circumstances peace may result from economic troubles. I define a rivalry as the perception by national elites of two states that the other state possesses conflicting interests and presents a military threat of sufficient severity that future military conflict is likely. Rivalry termination is the transition from a state of rivalry to one where conflicts of interest are not viewed as being so severe as to provoke interstate conflict and/or where a mutual recognition of the imbalance in military capabilities makes conflict-causing bargaining failures unlikely. In other words, rivalries terminate when the elites assess that the risks of military conflict between rivals has been reduced dramatically. This definition draws on a growing quantitative literature most closely associated with the research programs of William Thompson, J. Joseph Hewitt, and James P. Klein, Gary Goertz, and Paul F. Diehl.1 My definition conforms to that of William Thompson. In work with Karen Rasler, they define rivalries as situations in which “[b]oth actors view each other as a significant politicalmilitary threat and, therefore, an enemy.”2 In other work, Thompson writing with Michael Colaresi, explains further: The presumption is that decisionmakers explicitly identify who they think are their foreign enemies. They orient their military preparations and foreign policies toward meeting their threats. They assure their constituents that they will not let their adversaries take advantage. Usually, these activities are done in public. Hence, we should be able to follow the explicit cues in decisionmaker utterances and writings, as well as in the descriptive political histories written about the foreign policies of specific countries.3 Drawing from available records and histories, Thompson and David Dreyer have generated a universe of strategic rivalries from 1494 to 2010 that serves as the basis for this project’s empirical analysis.4 This project measures rivalry termination as occurring on the last year that Thompson and Dreyer record the existence of a rivalry. Economic crises lead to conciliatory behavior through five primary channels. (1) Economic crises lead to austerity pressures, which in turn incent leaders to search for ways to cut defense expenditures. (2) Economic crises also encourage strategic reassessment, so that leaders can argue to their peers and their publics that defense spending can be arrested without endangering the state. This can lead to threat deflation, where elites attempt to downplay the seriousness of the threat posed by a former rival. (3) If a state faces multiple threats, economic crises provoke elites to consider threat prioritization, a process that is postponed during periods of economic normalcy. (4) Economic crises increase the political and economic benefit from international economic cooperation. Leaders seek foreign aid, enhanced trade, and increased investment from abroad during periods of economic trouble. This search is made easier if tensions are reduced with historic rivals. (5) Finally, during crises, elites are more prone to select leaders who are perceived as capable of resolving economic difficulties, permitting the emergence of leaders who hold heterodox foreign policy views. Collectively, these mechanisms make it much more likely that a leader will prefer conciliatory policies compared to during periods of economic normalcy. This section reviews this causal logic in greater detail, while also providing historical examples that these mechanisms recur in practice. Economic Crisis Leads to Austerity Economic crises generate pressure for austerity. Government revenues are a function of national economic production, so that when production diminishes through recession, revenues available for expenditure also diminish. Planning almost invariably assumes growth rather than contraction, so the deviation i

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