170 world personalities, former political leaders and Nobel laureates, have officially asked American President Joe Biden for the temporary suspension of patent licenses for Coronavirus vaccines. These include the former presidents of the Spanish government José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and Felipe González, the former French president, François Hollande and the former British prime minister Gordon Brown
One of the very few studies related to vaccine research funding, notably done on Astra Zeneca, revealed that the pharmaceutical industry incurred less than 3% of research costs.. Most of the 120 million euros invested came from the UK government (45 million) and the European Commission (30 million), and the rest from entities supported by public funds and foundations.
The decisive weight of public aid confirms once again that “Public funding and international collaboration have been decisive in the discovery of vaccines against Covid-19” as the researchers of the independent organization Alliance of Universities for Essential Medicines in the United Kingdom argue. .
The results of the work recorded all the contributions that the pharmaceutical company has obtained. These results coincide in substance with the information published also on other vaccines against the virus, such as that of Moderna.
The United States under the Trump administration had allocated more than 3,400 million euros for the “development, clinical trials and production” of the drug, based on a new technology called the RNA messenger. An amount that is four times more than Moderna’s entire R&D budget in 2020.
Obviously this information has fueled the debate on the repeal of the patent system which currently blocks the production of vaccines by manufacturers other than licensees.
This constraint is delaying vaccination worldwide and above all makes the main motivation of the pharmaceutical industry very questionable, which is to be able to have patents up to 20 years in order to amortize the investments and risks of the development process.
Nine out of ten doses to date have been given to rich countries, while the poorest still have to wait months or years. The problem is not only ethical but also health as new variants resistant to the vaccine could take over.
The letter states that “the suspension would be a vital and necessary step to put an end to the pandemic. We hope your administration will consider a temporary suspension of WTO (World Trade Organization) intellectual property rights during the pandemic, as proposed by South Africa and India. “
The WTO has traditionally been the forum for rich countries and patent exemption has always been blocked by a few countries including the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Switzerland and Japan.
Despite heavy criticism of companies in the sector such as AstraZeneca, the European Union does not believe that the shortage of vaccines is due to blocked licenses, stating that “The problems are not solved by suspending patents. They are linked to insufficient production capacity. “
Many observers agree that in the short term, the suspension of patents would not solve the most pressing problem, which is to produce and supply vaccines for the whole world in the coming months. To guarantee doses to even the most vulnerable countries, it is necessary to guarantee greater resources to Covax (a coalition led by WHO) by establishing mechanisms for which excess vaccines go to poor countries.
In the debate, in some cases among the deaf, a third option has emerged within the WTO supported by countries such as Chile, Colombia, Australia and Canada that it would support so-called voluntary licensing, agreements between pharmaceutical companies to outsource the production of multiple doses to other companies.
This is, also for the EU, the best formula to increase production in the coming months.
Farmindustria, for its part, is convinced that “the projections of independent agencies suggest that the agreements between companies, 263 currently, should allow the necessary supply of the doses in the rest of the year. According to the available data, production in 2021 will amount to between 9,000 and 12,000 million doses, which should be enough to immunize at least 70% of the world population before the end of the year. “
We hope the Italian organization is right because the virus is not interested in political / economic agreements.