PARIS (AP) – In an industrial district on the outskirts of Bangladesh’s largest city is a factory with shiny new equipment imported from Germany, the spotless corridors with hermetically sealed chambers. It runs at only a quarter of its capacity.
It’s one of three factories that The Associated Press found on three continents, whose owners say they could produce hundreds of millions of COVID-19 vaccines in the short term if they had the blueprints and technical know-how. But that knowledge belongs to the major pharmaceutical companies that produced the first three vaccines approved by countries such as Great Britain, the European Union and the US – Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca. The factories are all still waiting for responses.
Across Africa and Southeast Asia, governments and relief agencies, as well as the World Health Organization, are calling on pharmaceutical companies to share their patent information more widely to meet a growing global shortage from a pandemic that has already claimed more than 2.5 million lives . Pharmaceutical companies that have pulled tax money from the US or Europe to develop vaccinations at unprecedented speed say they are negotiating contracts and exclusive licensing deals with manufacturers on a case-by-case basis because they need to protect their intellectual property and ensure safety.
Critics say this step-by-step approach is too slow at a time when there is an urgent need to stop the virus before it mutates into even more deadly forms. The WHO called on vaccine manufacturers to share their know-how to “dramatically increase the global supply”.
“If that can be done, every continent will overnight have dozens of companies that can produce these vaccines,” said Abdul Muktadir, whose Incepta factory in Bangladesh already makes vaccines against hepatitis, flu, meningitis, rabies, tetanus and measles .
Across the world, the supply of coronavirus vaccines is lagging far behind demand, and the limited amount available goes to rich countries. According to WHO, nearly 80% of vaccines have been administered in just 10 countries so far. More than 210 countries and territories with 2.5 billion people had not received a single withdrawal last week.
The deal-by-deal approach also means that some poorer countries end up paying more for the same vaccine than richer countries. According to studies and publicly available documents, South Africa, Mexico, Brazil and Uganda all pay different amounts per dose for the AstraZeneca vaccine – and more than governments in the European Union. AstraZeneca said the price of the vaccine will differ depending on local manufacturing costs and how many countries are ordering.
“What we’re seeing today is a stampede, a survival of the fittest approach, where those with the deepest pockets, with the sharpest elbows, grab what’s there and leave others to die,” said Winnie Byanyima, UNAIDS executive director.
In South Africa, home to the world’s most troubling COVID-19 variant, the Biovac plant has been saying for weeks that it has been negotiating with a no-contract unnamed manufacturer. And in Denmark, the Bavarian Scandinavian plant has spare capacity and the ability to make more than 200 million doses, but is also awaiting notification from the manufacturer of an approved coronavirus vaccine.
Governments and health experts offer two potential solutions to the vaccine shortage: one, supported by WHO, is a patent pool modeled on a platform set up for HIV, TB and hepatitis treatments for voluntary technology, intellectual property and data sharing. But no company has 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 making coronavirus vaccines. That drive has the support of at least 119 countries and the African Union, but is vigorously opposed by vaccine makers.
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 a more equitable vaccine distribution. The organization and its partners delivered their 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, has used the phrase “general common good” to describe the vaccines, but the European Union has imposed export controls on vaccines, giving countries the option to prevent shots from leaving.
What we’re seeing today is a stampede, a survival of the fittest approach, where those with the deepest pockets, with the sharpest elbows, grab what’s there and leave others to die.
–Winnie Byanyima, Executive Director of UNAIDS
On her first day as WTO Director General, Nigerian Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said it was time to shift focus to the vaccination needs of the world’s poor.
“We need to focus on working with companies to now open more viable manufacturing sites and license them in emerging markets and developing countries,” she told members of the organization. “This should happen soon so we can save lives.”
The long-held model in the pharmaceutical industry is that companies bring in huge amounts of money and research in exchange for the right to make a profit from their drugs and vaccines. Last May, Pfizer’s CEO Albert Bourla described the idea of widely sharing IP rights as “nonsense” and even “dangerous”.
Thomas Cueni, director general of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers, called the idea of removing patent protection “a very bad signal for the future. You indicate that if you have a pandemic, your patents are worth nothing.”
Proponents of vaccine blueprint sharing argue that unlike most drugs, taxpayers have paid billions to develop vaccines that can help end the world’s greatest public health emergency in living memory.
“People are literally dying because we cannot agree on intellectual property rights,” said Mustaqeem De Gama, a South African diplomat involved in WTO discussions.
Paul Fehlner, the chief legal officer of biotech company Axcella and a proponent of the WHO patent pool board, said governments that invested billions of dollars into vaccine and treatment development should have demanded more from the companies that funded them from the start.
“One condition for taking tax money is that they are not treated like dupes,” 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 manufacturing capacity in the developing world and partnering with drugs to ease their patents.
“Rich countries, including ourselves, have a moral responsibility when 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 vaccine could be produced worldwide if restrictions on intellectual property were lifted. But Suhaib Siddiqi, former director of chemistry at Moderna, said with the blueprint and technical advice that a modern plant should be able to get vaccine production up and running in three to four months.
“In my opinion, the vaccine belongs to the public,” said Siddiqi. “Any company that has experience in synthesizing molecules should be able to do that.”
Back in Bangladesh, the Incepta plant tried to get what it needed to make more vaccines in two ways: by offering its production lines to Moderna and by contacting a WHO partner. Moderna did not respond to requests for comment about the Bangladesh factory, but its CEO, Stéphane Bancel, told European lawmakers that the company’s engineers were in the process of expanding production in Europe.
“In fact, by transferring more technology now, production and increased output could be at great risk for the coming months,” he said. “We are very open to doing it in the future once our current sites are up and running.”
Muktadir said he fully appreciates the extraordinary scientific achievement involved in the creation of vaccines this year, wants the rest of the world to share and is willing to pay a fair price.
“No one should just give up their property for nothing,” he said. “A vaccine can be made accessible to humans – high-quality, effective 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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