PARIS (AP) – In an industrial district on the outskirts of Bangladesh’s largest city is a factory with shiny new equipment imported from Germany, its immaculate corridors lined with hermetically sealed rooms. It operates at only a quarter of its capacity.
It is one of three factories The Associated Press found on three continents, whose owners say they could start producing hundreds of millions of COVID-19 vaccines in a short time if they only had the plans and technical knowledge. But this knowledge belongs to the major pharmaceutical companies that have produced the first three vaccines authorized by countries such as Britain, the European Union and the United States: Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca. All 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 deficit in a pandemic that has already killed more than 2.5 million lives. Pharmaceutical companies that withdrew money from U.S. or European taxpayers to develop inoculations at an unprecedented rate say they are negotiating contracts and exclusive licensing agreements with producers on a case-by-case basis because they must protect their intellectual property. lectual and ensure security.
Critics say this partial approach is too slow at a time of urgent need to stop the virus before it mutates into even more deadly forms. The WHO called on vaccine manufacturers to share their knowledge to “drastically increase global supply.”
“If this can be done, immediately, overnight, all continents will have dozens of companies that can produce these vaccines,” said Abdul Muktadir, whose Incepta plant in Bangladesh makes vaccines against hepatitis, flu, meningitis, rabies, tetanus and measles.
Worldwide, the supply of coronavirus vaccines is below demand and the limited amount available goes to rich countries. According to the WHO, almost 80% of vaccines have been administered in only ten countries. More than 210 countries and territories with 2.5 billion people had not received a single shot since last week.
The deal-to-deal approach also means that some poorer countries end up paying more for the same vaccine than richer countries. South Africa, Mexico, Brazil and Uganda pay different amounts per dose for the AstraZeneca vaccine, and more than European Union governments, according to studies and public documents. AstraZeneca said the price of the vaccine will vary depending on local production costs and the number of orders from countries.
“What we see today is a stampede, a survival of the fittest approach, where those with the deepest pockets, with the sharpest elbows, take what’s there and let others die,” said Winnie Byanyima, UNAIDS Executive Director.
In South Africa, home to the world’s most troubling variant COVID-19, the Biovac factory has claimed for weeks that it is in negotiations with an unnamed manufacturer that has no contract to prove it. And in Denmark, the Bavarian Nordic factory has the capacity to save and is capable of making more than 200 million doses, but it is also waiting for news of the producer of an authorized coronavirus vaccine.
Governments and health experts offer two possible solutions to vaccine shortages: one, with WHO support, is a set of patents based on a platform created for the treatment of HIV, tuberculosis and hepatitis. to voluntarily share technology, intellectual property and data. But no company has offered to share their data.
The other, a proposal to suspend intellectual property rights during the pandemic, has been blocked at the World Trade Organization by the United States and Europe, where the companies responsible for creating coronavirus vaccines are located. This impetus has the support of at least 119 countries and the African Union, but vaccine manufacturers are strongly opposed to it.
Pharmaceutical companies say that instead of removing intellectual property restrictions, rich countries should give more vaccines to poorer countries through COVAX, the WHO public-private initiative that helped create a more 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, has used the phrase “global common good” to describe vaccines, but the European Union imposed export controls on vaccines, giving countries the power to stop get out of the shots.
What we see today is a stampede, a survival of the fittest approach, where those with the deepest pockets, with the sharpest elbows, take what is there and let others die.
–Winnie Byanyima, UNAIDS Executive Director
In her first day as WTO Director-General, Nigerian Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said it was time to shift attention to the vaccination needs of the world’s poor.
“We need to focus on working with companies to open and license more viable manufacturing sites now in emerging markets and developing countries,” he told members of the organization. “This should happen soon so we can save lives.”
The long-term model of the pharmaceutical industry is that companies invest large amounts of money and research in exchange for the right to profit from their drugs and vaccines. Last May, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla described the idea of widely sharing intellectual property rights as “nonsense” and even “dangerous”.
Thomas Cueni, director general of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers, described the idea of lifting patent protections as “a very bad sign for the future. You indicate that if you have a pandemic your patents are worthless.”
Proponents of the shared vaccine plan argue that, unlike most drugs, taxpayers paid billions to develop vaccines that could help end the world’s largest public health emergency in memory.
“People are literally dying because we can’t agree on intellectual property rights,” said Mustaqeem De Gama, a South African diplomat involved in WTO talks.
Paul Fehlner, legal director of biotechnology company Axcella and a supporter of the WHO patent board, said governments that invested billions of dollars in vaccine development and that treatments should have required more to the companies they financed from the beginning.
“One condition for taking taxpayers’ money is not to treat them as scams, ”he said.
Last month, Dr. Anthony Fauci, a leading pandemic expert in the United States, said all options need to be put on the table, including improving production capacity in the developing world and working with pharmaceuticals to relax their patents.
“Rich countries, including ourselves, have a moral responsibility when we have a global outbreak like this,” Fauci said. “We need to vaccinate the whole world, not just our own country.”
It is difficult to know exactly how much more vaccine could be made worldwide if intellectual property restrictions were removed. But Suhaib Siddiqi, former director of chemistry at Moderna, said that with the plan and technical advice, a modern factory should be able to get vaccine production within three to four months.
“In my opinion, the vaccine belongs to the public,” Siddiqi said. “Any company that has experience in synthesizing molecules should be able to do that.”
Back in Bangladesh, the Incepta factory tried to get what it needed to make more vaccines in two ways, by offering its production lines to Moderna and contacting a WHO partner. Moderna did not respond to requests for comment on the Bangladesh plant, but its CEO, Stéphane Bancel, told European lawmakers that the company’s engineers were fully engaged in expanding production in Europe.
“Doing more technology transfer right now could jeopardize production and increase production for the next few months,” he said. “We are very open to doing so in the future once our current sites are run.”
Muktadir said he fully values the extraordinary scientific achievement that vaccine creation has brought this year, that he wants the rest of the world to be able to participate and that he is willing to pay a fair price.
“No one should cede their property for anything,” he said. “A vaccine could be made accessible to people: effective, high-quality vaccines.”
Maria 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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