I strongly believe it is our moral duty to buy-out or invalidate the IP of (at the very least) these viral vector vaccines lest even more people die unnecessarily, while we are having interesting theoretical armchair arguments from the comfort of our increasingly vaccinated western societies.
If US/UK would finally allow vaccine exports like the EU does, _that_ would help India.
It's also maybe a little relevant that the Modi government didn't order nearly enough vaccines early enough.
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
I am not sure that the moral panic is even justified.
Makeshift funeral pyres in the middle of a city street don't happen in a country where something hasn't gone terribly wrong
Delhi's official death rate of the last 7 days was 9 per 100k, and University of Michigan are estimating real rates at 2-5 times higher than that for India as a whole.
[0]: https://health.kerala.gov.in/pdf/Technical-paper-All-Cause-M...
The same was said in Germany/Saxony (crematoria capacity reached), however they plain omitted the fact that usually these were outsourced to Czech Republic, but borders were closed. Cherry-picking parts of the story but omitting others is so common that I am hesitant to take it as is.
It would be certainly better to have overall mortality, so it would be easier to reason about the veracity of COVID mortality, however I am not convinced by obvious emotional manipulation.
> Delhi's official death rate of the last 7 days was 9 per 100k, and University of Michigan are estimating real rates at 2-5 times higher than that for India as a whole.
9/100k/w is not very high for cities given they are drastically more affected by pandemics in general. 2-5 times is quite a big margin, but I would be interested in how they came to these numbers.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2021/04/24/worl...
“It’s a complete massacre of data,” said Bhramar Mukherjee, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan who has been following India closely. “From all the modeling we’ve done, we believe the true number of deaths is two to five times what is being reported.”
I know it's theoretical, I'm just saying, perhaps it will not be all good. But we'll deal with that when we get to it. Maybe viral vaccines should be an organized governmental effort from now on. Coordinated by WHO or something.
Oh?
" "Manufacturing mRNA vaccines is surprisingly straightforward. Compared to conventional vaccine production, mRNA factories are: * 99 - 99.9% smaller * 95 - 99.7% cheaper * 1,000% faster"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27061674
https://coronavirus.medium.com/manufacturing-mrna-vaccines-i...
https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1389978947723546625
https://aiche.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/amp2....
> These will be special-purpose bespoke machines, and if you ask other drug companies if they have one sitting around, the answer will be “Of course not”. This is not anything close to a traditional drug manufacturing process. And this is the single biggest reason why you cannot simply call up those “dozens” of other companies and ask them to shift their existing production over to making the mRNA vaccines. There are not dozens of companies who make DNA templates on the needed scale. There are definitely not dozens of companies who can make enough RNA. But most importantly, I believe that you can count on one hand the number of facilities who can make the critical lipid nanoparticles.
Also see this article[1] which details the supply chain of mRNA vaccines as well as the bottleneck of lipid nanoparticle assembly. These mRNA vaccines also have strict requirements for storage/distribution, preventing them from wider usage.
[0]: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/02/02/my...
[1]: https://blog.jonasneubert.com/2021/01/10/exploring-the-suppl...
I'm going to take a guess, but maybe in ten years time, the answer will be "Of course, yes".
Why wouldn't it be?
Will it be a big deal in the long term then?
Imho: If this becomes real, don't expect big benefits. I appreciate what Moderna did but forcing other companies to do the same may be overkill for little benefit and I wonder what the long term effect is on companies' willingness to focus on a vaccine for the next pandemic. Perhaps companies realize that waiving IP rights is good PR, or they can do it for parts of the process that is easier to scale or outsource to 3rd parties.
What happens to startups that do find an easy to copy vaccine production process and they know their IP will be taken from them? I honestly don't know but I feel that they should be fairly compensated... But what's fair. IP is just so difficult. I wonder what a world without it would look like. More company secrets, that's for sure.
[0] https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-d...