Bill Gates disagreed with sharing 'the recipe' for the coronavirus vaccines, but it doesn't mean he's refusing to expand production in developing nations
· Bill Gates is being accused of refusing to share COVID-19 vaccine formulas with developing nations.
· The
source of that accusation is a Sky News interview with
Gates - but he doesn't say that.
· Instead,
Gates speaks to the difficulties of ramping up vaccine production in untested
facilities.
· Visit the Business section of Insider for more stories.
Bill Gates has advocated for pandemic preparedness for years, and famously gave a TED talk in 2015 that warned of the potentially staggering death toll a worldwide pandemic could create.
Now, as COVID-19
vaccines roll out in response to the ongoing worldwide pandemic, Gates is being
accused of withholding vaccine recipes from developing nations due to his
response in a recent interview.
"Bill Gates says no to sharing vaccine formulas with global poor to end pande
mic," one headline reads.
"Bill Gates under fire for saying vaccine formulas shouldn't be shared
with developing world," said another.
Both pieces cite a Sky News interview with Gates that ran this week, wherein Gates is asked if it would be helpful to change intellectual property law in order to enable "the recipe for these vaccines to be shared."Gates answers, "No," which by itself could be interpreted as him standing up for intellectual property law and refusing to share vaccine formulas with developing nations. But then Gates goes on to answer the inevitable follow up question: "Why not?"
The reason,
Gates said, is due to the complexity of manufacturing safe vaccines.
"There are
only so many vaccine factories in the world, and people are very serious about
the safety of vaccines," he said. "The thing that's holding things
back in this case isn't intellectual property. It's not like there's some idle
vaccine factory with regulatory approval that makes magically safe vaccines.
You've gotta do the trials on these things. And every manufacturing process has
to be looked at in a very careful way."
Moreover, Gates
said getting COVID vaccine manufacturers like Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Moderna, and
Johnson & Johnson to share vaccine formulas has already happened - such as the case
with India.
"We got all
the rights from the vaccine companies," he said. "They didn't hold it
back, they were participating."
You can watch
the full interview with Gates here:
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original article on Business Insider
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