This isn't going to help India or anyone in the short term and there'll be more than enough doses for every person on Earth by next year. Why should they not retain the IP rights to make a profit on new generations that need to be vaccinated or potential booster shots? The manufacturing capacity will have been built up so scarcity won't be a problem at that point.
If you held a firm conviction that in the near future you'd be able to act on the IP without being in violation, would you be more motivate to progress toward doing so more swiftly?
As a patent holder, would you feel more secure that you could issue cease and desist notices and peruse damages after the waiver is lifted?
Why not? I’m not hearing a clear argument or evidence to support that withholding the patent recipe wouldn’t save millions of lives?
India now has a very high number of cases. As it stands now, your argument just sounds to me like:
“yes human lives, but... profit“.
Please could you elaborate on your argument and/or provide examples of what you’re describing happening in other cases?
This is about mRNA vaccines, but similar things exist for viral vector vaccines as well. Technology transfer, bioreactor bags, fill-finish capacity, all of these things are bottlenecked till next year basically.
There is a pharmaceutical industry in India that is not being given the opportunity to get in this fight and some people say they could help and others say they can’t.
So give them a chance and test if they can!
Yes, the most likely reason why someone would have a different opinion is because they're somehow invested - emotionally, financially, whatever - in the existing vaccine manufacturers.
RNA based experiments are doable in most university labs. It is 2021.
There is a huge difference between doing RNA experiments versus manufacturing millions of doses of mRNA vaccine without errors or contamination.
The approach to intellectual property in China is much more open, partly because the leaders understand that technical expertise is more than just a one-off design, and competitors probably can't enter the market without significant capital investment and risk. In the case of healthcare, I suspect that regulators will prevent any vaccines manufactured with sub-standard procedures, such as those made in university labs.