Page 13 - MONTT LATIN AMERICAN MAGAZINE, MAY 2021, (English)

World in Data, just two per cent of Africans received their rst puncture.
“The current problem is that there are not many doses of vaccines available, because, for example, the European Union and the United States made sure to store as many inoculations as possible,” says the head of health issues at the Bread for the World organization. (Brot für die Welt), belonging to the regional Evangelical Churches of Germany, Sonja Weinreich, who adds: “In that sense, this mechanism did not really work, because there is no kind of solidarity in this regard.”
Vaccine Patents
To remedy the situation, different organizations are requesting the suspension of vaccine patents: “But that would have to be accompanied by the corresponding transfer of technology,” explains Sonja Weinreich, “because coronavirus vaccines are high-tech products that cannot be produced so easily by any drug manufacturer”.
The general director of the pan-European lobby group European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations, EFPIA, clari es that: “When a company contacts another to expand the production of vaccines, a large amount of technical knowledge must be transferred to be able to generate them safely and e iciently in the quantities required. It is about much more than just intellectual property. “ According to the co-founder of the Modern company, Kenneth Chien, a patent is like the recipe for a unique gastronomy dish: “Even knowing all the ingredients of the vaccine, this technology is so new and it is so surrounded by industrial secrets that almost no one could replicate it without the advice of the production companies”.
The concrete fact is that the majority of the production companies and laboratories, together with the governments where these products were investigated and developed, are opposed to assigning the rights; hence the surprise that the President of the United States, Joe Biden, recently gave, when at the
beginning of May, he changed the position of his country and asked that everyone else supported the suspension of patents.
Of all the vaccines sold, only 0,2 percent reached the least developed countries, according to the WHO, and this is partly due to the fact that messenger RNA vaccines are injections for the First World: they need refrigeration at temperatures of 70 degrees below zero that make it impossible to distribute them in many rural areas of Africa, Asia and even Latin America.
A few days ago, P zer announced that this year it expects revenues of about USD $ 26,000 millions from the sale of its vaccine around the world. Its product requires 280 ingredients and materials that come from 19 di erent countries, according to the company’s president, Albert Bourla, in an open letter in which he expressed his refusal to lift the patents. The problem, he said, is not so much infrastructure, but raw materials: there are no vials, sterile bags, reagents or enzymes necessary to “cook” the vaccine. He added that if developing countries start producing their own injections, they will enter the market and acquire those raw materials. “Entities with little or no experience in manufacturing vaccines will demand these elements that we need, putting the safety and health of all at risk,” Bourla concluded in his letter.
Public Money
But not everyone agrees with the P zer president’s explanation; in fact, Doctors Without Borders experts indicate that the DNA-based injection of AstraZeneca is of a type that had hardly been used before and that it requires using mammalian cells to grow the simian viruses that are used as a vehicle, a complex process, new, but already undertaken at the Serological Institute of India following an agreement with AstraZeneca.
RNA vaccines are very di icult to produce, as it is a new technology that requires not only cultivating bacteria but - and this is the real bottleneck - making nanospheres
of fat that are essential for transporting the vaccine into cells and getting started the immunization processes. “The problem is that pharmaceutical companies do not disclose detailed information on how their vaccines are made, and in order to manufacture them in developing countries we need them to answer several questions,” adds Alain Alsalhani, pharmacist at Doctors Without Borders.
Paradoxically, the vast majority of the knowledge behind vaccines was achieved in public research centers and was funded with taxpayer money. The formula for creating messenger RNA molecules was obtained by Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman at the University of Pennsylvania. The coronavirus protein on which most immunizations are based was developed in a public laboratory at the US National Institutes of Health.
A patent suspension may a ect not just covid vaccines, but many more treatments: from cancer vaccines to immunizations against 30 other diseases. It is a gold mine that nobody wants to give away.
While this complex debate is being settled, the World Health Organization decided to pursue an alternative route for developing countries to manufacture their own RNA vaccines without relying on patents or the knowledge of Big Pharma.
They are based on the cooperation of scientists from public and private institutions who know how these products are made. Martin Friede, head of vaccine research at WHO, explains: “We have already been contacted by 10 research groups and experts from small biotech companies in the United States, Europe and Canada willing to advise and lead the project.”
At the same time, India - where a company has already developed a messenger RNA vaccine that is about to start clinical trials - South Africa and Senegal have shown interest in hosting future factories.
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The Vaccine Gap Problem with Vaccines