Finland Had a Patent-Free Covid-19 Vaccine Nine Months Ago
jacobinmag.com
jacobinmag.com
Also, it talks about $400M for Moderna of government funding last year, when the vaccine was done (but trials not finished), but ignores >$1B of private money that went into 10 years of researching it.
It also tries to paint patents as the culprit for sone of the issues with vaccine production. But Moderna released their covid patents for free, and AZ licenses it easily - so it’s really not an issue of patents.
This sounds so cool. Imagine what would be possible with open collaboration between states, technology sharing and public funding.
We don't even have to imagine: we had a patent-free vaccine, better than the privately developed ones and available before all those. Yet we chose to get into the mess we are in now, with many states uncapable of providing enough vaccines in time.
Why is that? While there can be many answers, the root motive is and will always be the same: profit.
Still convinced that pharmaceutics corporations guided only by their shareholders hunger are our best way to go to take care of medical research?
The vaccine mentioned in the article was developed later than Moderna & Pfitzer, and it’s Adenovirus based, so it’s most likely worse than them, and closer to AZ or J&J.
It’s like comparing a paper written about doing online search and a deployed, working on production system.
In many cases it’s easy to do a first prototype, but getting it to production - especially with sevurity considerations - is the hard part.
(For some things the research cost is high too of course, but here, for mRNA vaccines, the research cost was taken up by private money).
I am against patents in general, but the narrative about Covid vaccine patents is just plain dishonest.