PARIS (AP) – In an industrial neighborhood on the outskirts of the largest city in Bangladesh, there is a factory with shiny new equipment imported from Germany, its immaculate corridors 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 has found on three continents, whose owners say they could start producing hundreds of millions of COVID-19 vaccines in a short time if they had the designs and the technical knowledge. But that knowledge belongs to the big pharmaceutical companies that produce the first three vaccines authorized by countries like 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 asking pharmaceutical companies to share their patent information more widely to address a scarce global shortage. in a pandemic that has claimed more than 2.5 million lives. Pharmaceutical companies that have drawn taxpayer money from the United States or Europe to develop vaccines at an unprecedented rate say they are negotiating exclusive licensing contracts and agreements with producers on a case-by-case basis because they need to protect their intellectual property and ensure security.
Critics say this fragmented approach is too slow in a time of urgent need to stop the virus before it turns into even more deadly forms. WHO asked vaccine manufacturers to share their know-how to “dramatically increase the global supply”.
“If this can be done, then immediately at night all continents will have dozens of companies that would be able to produce these vaccines,” said Abdul Muktadir, whose Incepta factory in Bangladesh already makes vaccines against hepatitis, flu, meningitis, rabies, tetanus and measles.
Worldwide, the supply of vaccines against coronavirus is far below demand and the limited quantity available goes to rich countries. Nearly 80% of vaccines have so far been administered in only 10 countries, according to the WHO. More than 210 countries and territories with a collective population of 2.5 billion had not received a single shot last week.
The agreement-by-agreement approach also means that some poorer countries end up paying more for the same vaccine as the richest countries. South Africa, Mexico, Brazil and Uganda pay different amounts per dose for the AstraZeneca vaccine – more than governments in the European Union, according to publicly available studies and documents. AstraZeneca said the price of the vaccine will be different depending on factors such as production costs, where the injections are made and how much the countries order.
“What we see today is a stampede, a survival of the most appropriate approach, where those with the deepest pockets, with the sharpest elbows are grabbing what’s there and letting others die,” said Winnie Byanyima, executive director of UNAIDS.
In South Africa, home to the world’s most worrying COVID-19 variant, the Biovac factory said for weeks that it is in negotiations with an unidentified manufacturer, with no contract to show him. And in Denmark, the Bavarian Nordic factory has spare capacity and the capacity to make more than 200 million doses, but it is also waiting for word from the producer of a licensed coronavirus vaccine.
Governments and health experts offer two potential solutions to vaccine shortages: One, supported by WHO, is a patent pool modeled after a platform created for HIV, tuberculosis and hepatitis treatments for voluntary sharing of technology, intellectual property and Dice. But no company has offered to share its data or transfer the necessary technology.
The other, a proposal to suspend intellectual property rights during the pandemic, it was blocked at the World Trade Organization by the United States and Europe, the headquarters of the companies responsible for creating the vaccines against the coronavirus. This initiative is supported by at least 119 countries among the 164 member states of the WTO and the African Union, but it is strongly contested by vaccine manufacturers.
Pharmaceutical companies say that instead of lifting intellectual property restrictions, rich countries should simply give more vaccines to the poorest countries. through COVAX, the WHO public-private initiative helped to create for equitable distribution of vaccines. The organization and its partners delivered their first doses last week – in very limited quantities.
But rich countries are not willing to give up what they have. Ursula Von der Leyen, head of the European Commission, used the phrase “global common good” to describe vaccines. Even so, the European Union imposed export controls vaccines, giving countries the power to prevent shots from crossing their borders in some cases.
The longstanding model in the pharmaceutical industry is that companies pour huge amounts of money and research in exchange for the right to reap the profits from their medicines and vaccines. At an industry forum last May, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla described the idea of sharing IP rights widely as “absurd” and even “dangerous”. The head of AstraZeneca, Pascal Soriot, said that if intellectual property is not protected, “there is no incentive for anyone to innovate”.
Thomas Cueni, director general of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Products Manufacturers, considered the idea of suspending patent protections “a very bad sign for the future. You signal that if you have a pandemic, your patents are worthless. ”
Proponents of sharing vaccine schemes argue that, unlike most drugs, taxpayers have paid billions to develop vaccines that are now “global public goods” and should be used to end the greatest public health emergency in memory .
“People are literally dying because we cannot reach an agreement on intellectual property rights,” said Mustaqeem De Gama, a South African diplomat who was deeply involved in the WTO discussions.
Paul Fehlner, chief legal officer at the biotechnology company Axcella and an advocate for the WHO patent pool board, said governments that poured billions of dollars into vaccine and treatment development should have demanded more from the companies they funded from the start.
“One condition for accepting taxpayer money is not to treat them as naive,” he said.
In an interview with the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the leading pandemic expert in the United States, said that all options need to be available, including increased aid, improved production capacity in the developing world and I work with pharmaceutical companies to relax their patents.
“Rich countries, including ourselves, have a moral responsibility when there is a global outbreak like this,” said Fauci. “We need to vaccinate the entire world, not just our country.”
It is difficult to know exactly how much more vaccine it could be done worldwide if intellectual property restrictions were lifted, because the factories’ spare production capacity was not shared publicly. But Suhaib Siddiqi, former chemistry director at Moderna, said that with the design and technical consultancy, a modern factory should be able to start producing vaccines in a maximum of three to four months.
“In my opinion, the vaccine belongs to the public,” said Siddiqi. “Any company with experience in synthesizing molecules should be able to do that.”
Back in Bangladesh, the Incepta factory tried to get what it needed to manufacture more vaccines in two ways: by offering its production lines to Moderna and by contacting a WHO partner. Moderna did not respond to several requests for comment on the Bangladeshi factory, but its CEO, Stéphane Bancel, told European lawmakers that the company’s engineers are fully occupied with expanding production in Europe.
“Doing more technology transfer now can put production and increased production at great risk in the coming months,” he said. “We are very open to doing this in the future, once our current sites are up and running.”
Muktadir said he was also in discussions last May with CEPI, or Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, one of WHO’s partners in a global effort to buy and distribute COVID-19 vaccines fairly, but it came to nothing. CEPI spokesman Tom Mooney said that negotiations last year with Incepta have not sparked interest, but that CEPI is still in discussions “about matchmaking opportunities, including the possibility of using Incepta’s capacity for vaccines of second wave ”.
Muktadir said he fully appreciates the extraordinary scientific achievement involved in creating vaccines this year, wants the rest of the world to be able to share it and is willing to pay a fair price.
“Nobody should give up their property for anything,” he said. “A vaccine could be made available to people – effective, high-quality vaccines.”
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Cheng reported 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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