Millennie Al wrote: ↑Mon Apr 26, 2021 2:04 am
Bird on a Fire wrote: ↑Sat Apr 24, 2021 8:15 am
Seeing as the Western pharma companies have been claiming they're selling it at cost price, I don't quite understand why it's any skin off their nose to allow another factory to make it. But maintaining a tight grip over their patents - using government power to do so - is going to kill hundreds of thousands of people.
Nice job, greed and capitalism.
You must have missed the publicity regarding AstraZenica and their production difficulties and missed deliveries. Manufacture of a novel vaccine is difficult, and if it goes wrong there is bad publicity. If it goes badly wrong, it can kill people. Given what has happened with regard to AZ specificially - see
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-56570364 - other manufacturers would be totally insane to work for anything other than profit as it's clear that that is all that they can expect.
Thing is, if there's a massive global demand for something, and other companies are making rivals and so you have a limited time-window, licensing someone else to produce it & you get, say, a penny a jab, is just free money & you wouldn't otherwise get it.
I find it insane that at least the AZ & JnJ jabs haven't been licensed for manufacture in more plants.
Pfizer and Moderna I get - it's a novel and more complex manufacturing process, but these guys are using established tech that can be relatively easily replicated anywhere.
Poor countries should just ignore the patent and start making it within their own country for their people - they can offer AZ/Oxford/JnJ a licensing fee.
It's not like the USA is going to bomb a plant manufacturing the JnJ vaccine for the people of Algeria or Botswana or anywhere else in Africa, is it?