Countries urge drug companies to share vaccine know-howhttps://apnews.com/article/drug-companies-called-share-vaccine-info-22d92afbc3ea9ed519be007f8887bcf6PARIS (AP) — In an industrial neighborhood on the outskirts of Bangladesh’s largest city lies a factory with gleaming new equipment imported from Germany, its immaculate hallways lined with hermetically sealed rooms. It is operating at just a quarter of its capacity.
It is one of three factories that The Associated Press found on three continents whose owners say they could start producing hundreds of millions of COVID-19 vaccines on short notice if only they had the blueprints and technical know-how. But that knowledge belongs to the large pharmaceutical companies who have produced the first three vaccines authorized by countries including Britain, the European Union and the U.S. — Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca. The factories are all still awaiting responses.
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 broadly to meet a yawning global shortfall in a pandemic that already has claimed over 2.5 million lives. Pharmaceutical companies that took taxpayer money from the U.S. or Europe to develop inoculations at unprecedented speed say they are negotiating contracts and exclusive licensing deals with producers on a case-by-case basis because they need to protect their intellectual property and ensure safety.
Guilt-tripping plunder attempt! "The laborer is worthy of his hire" - whether BioNTech/Pfizer, who largely/entirely invested their own $$ or Moderna and J & J, who both invested their own $$
and had substantial US goverment $$, they invested their own $$ and labor and deserve the appropriate $$ reward. BioNTech and Moderna did not "just" develop a vaccine, they did the decade or more of work to take mRNA technology from academic theory to a platform capable of producing a successful product. Let these wannabe producers - who admit they do
not have the technology and equipment, as well as the knowledge - pay the licensing, buy the equipment, and sign the bleeping NDAs!
