PARIS (AP) – In an industrial suburb on the outskirts of Bangladesh’s largest city, lies a factory with glittering new equipment imported from Germany, with its impeccable corridors with hermetically sealed chambers. It operates at only a quarter of its capacity.
It is one of three factories that The Associated Press has found in three continents, whose owners say they can start producing hundreds of millions of COVID-19 vaccines at short notice if they only have the blueprints and technical knowledge. But the knowledge belongs to the major pharmaceutical companies that manufactured the first three vaccines approved by countries including Britain, the European Union and the United States, Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca. The factories are still waiting for answers.
Across Africa and Southeast Asia, governments and aid groups, as well as the World Health Organization, are calling on pharmaceutical companies to share their patent information more widely to address a growing global shortage in a pandemic that has claimed more than 2.5 million lives. handle. Pharmaceutical companies that have taken taxpayer money from the US or Europe to develop vaccinations at unprecedented speeds say they are negotiating contracts and exclusive licensing agreements on a case-by-case basis because they need to protect their intellectual property and ensure safety.
Critics believe that this piecemeal approach is too slow in an urgent need to stop the virus before it turns into even more deadly forms. WHO urges vaccine manufacturers to share their knowledge to ‘dramatically increase global supply’.
“If this can be done, every continent will immediately have dozens of businesses capable of producing these vaccines,” said Abdul Muktadir, whose Incepta plant in Bangladesh already produces vaccines against hepatitis, flu, meningitis, rabies, tetanus and measles.
Around the world, the supply of coronavirus vaccines is falling far less than the demand, and the limited quantity is going to rich countries. According to WHO, almost 80% of the vaccines have been administered in only ten countries. More than 210 countries and areas with 2.5 billion people did not get a single chance last week.
The approach by agreement also means that some poorer countries end up paying more for the same vaccine than richer countries. South Africa, Mexico, Brazil and Uganda all pay different amounts per dose for the AstraZeneca vaccine – and more than governments in the European Union, according to studies and publicly available documents. AstraZeneca said the price of the vaccine will vary depending on local production costs and how many countries order.
“What we are seeing today is a rush, a continuation of the fittest approach, where those with the deepest pockets, with the sharpest elbows grab those out there and let others die,” said Winnie Byanyima, executive director of UNAIDS, said.
In South Africa, home to the world’s most worrying COVID-19 variant, the Biovac factory has been saying for weeks that it is in talks with an unnamed manufacturer who has no contract for it. And in Denmark, the Bavarian Nordic factory has the capacity to make more than 200 million doses, but is also awaiting the word of the producer of a licensed coronavirus vaccine.
Governments and health experts offer two possible solutions to the shortage of vaccines: one, supported by the WHO, is a patent pool based on a platform for HIV, tuberculosis and hepatitis treatments for the voluntary sharing of technology, intellectual property and data. But no company offered to share its data.
The other, a proposal to suspend intellectual property rights during the pandemic, has been blocked in the World Trade Organization by the United States and Europe, home to the companies responsible for coronavirus vaccination. The fight has the support of at least 119 countries and the African Union, but is being enthusiastically produced.
Pharmaceutical companies say that instead of lifting IP restrictions, rich countries should simply give more vaccines to poorer countries through COVAX, the public-private initiative that helped create WO for a more equitable distribution of vaccines. The organization and its partners delivered its first doses in very limited quantities last week.
But rich countries are not willing to give up what they have. Ursula Von der Leyen, head of the European Commission, used the term “general welfare” to describe the vaccines, but the European Union has introduced export controls on vaccines, giving countries the power to prevent shots being fired.
What we see today is a rush, a continuation of the fittest approach, where those with the deepest pockets, with the sharpest elbows, grab what is there and let others die.
–Winnie Byanyima, Executive Director of UNAIDS
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Nigeria, said on her first day as WTO Director – General that the time had come to draw attention to the vaccination needs of the world’s poor.
“We need to focus on working with companies to license more viable manufacturing sites in emerging markets and developing countries,” she told members of the organization. “It should happen soon so we can save lives.”
The long-standing model in the pharmaceutical industry is that companies raise huge amounts of money and research in exchange for the right to profit from their medicines and vaccines. Last May, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla described the idea of sharing IP rights widely as “nonsense” and even “dangerous”.
Thomas Cueni, director general of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers, called the idea of abolishing patent protections a very bad signal for the future. You indicate that if you have a pandemic, your patents are worthless. ‘
Proponents of sharing vaccine sketches argue that taxpayers, unlike most drugs, have paid billions to develop vaccines that could help end the world’s biggest public health emergency in memory.
“People are literally dying because we can not agree on intellectual property rights,” said Mustaqeem De Gama, a South African diplomat involved in the WTO talks.
Paul Fehlner, chief legal officer of the biotechnology company Axcella and a proponent of the WTO patent board, said governments that had poured billions of dollars into developing vaccines and treatments should have demanded more from the companies they funded from the start.
A condition for taking money from taxpayers is not to consider it duplicates, ‘he said.
Last month, dr. Anthony Fauci, the leading pandemic expert in the United States, said all options should be on the table, including improving production capacity in the developing world and working with pharmaceuticals to relax their patents.
“Rich countries, including us, have a moral responsibility if you have a global outbreak,” Fauci said. “We need to get the whole world vaccinated, not just our own country.”
It is difficult to know exactly how much more vaccine can be made worldwide if the intellectual property restrictions are lifted. But Suhaib Siddiqi, former director of chemistry at Moderna, said with the blueprint and technical advice, a modern factory should be able to get vaccine production up to three to four months at most.
“In my opinion, the vaccine belongs to the public,” Siddiqi said. “Any company that has experience in the synthesis of molecules should be able to do that.”
Back in Bangladesh, the Incepta factory tried in two ways to get what was needed to make more vaccines, by offering its production lines to Moderna and by contacting a WTO partner. Moderna did not respond to requests for comment on the plant in Bangladesh, but its chief executive, Stéphane Bancel, told European lawmakers that the company’s engineers were busy expanding production in Europe.
“By making more technological transfers, production and increased production could pose a major risk for the coming months,” he said. “We are very open to doing so in the future once our current sites are available.”
Muktadir said he fully appreciates the extraordinary scientific achievement in terms of vaccine creation this year, wants the rest of the world to share in it and is willing to pay a fair price.
“No one should just give away their property for free,” he said. “A vaccine can be made accessible to humans – effective, high-quality vaccines.”
Maria Cheng reports from Toronto. Jamey Keaten in Geneva, Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen, Denmark, Al-Emrun Garjon in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and Andrew Meldrum in Johannesburg, South Africa, contributed to this report.
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