Developed and developing nations are clashing again and thepertinent issue this time is the manufacture of Covid vaccine.
Bill Gates, in response to a question regarding sharing ofthe recipe for Covid vaccines with developing nations (which includes India),he emphatically clarified that this will not happen.
An Indian newspaper reported Gates claiming, “There’s onlyso many vaccine factories in the world and people are very serious about thesafety of vaccines. And so moving something that had never been done, moving avaccine, say, from a [Johnson & Johnson] factory into a factory in India,it’s novel, it’s only because of our grants and expertise that can happen atall.”
Gates continued, “It’s not as simple as just sharing arecipe — the drug needs to be tried and tested and for this, the manufacturingprocess has to be done with extreme caution, “The thing that’s holding thingsback, in this case, is not intellectual property. It’s not like there’s someidle vaccine factory, with regulatory approval, that makes magically safevaccines. You know, you’ve got to do the trial on these things. And everymanufacturing process needs to be looked at in a very careful way.”
Gates elaborated that the action of rich nationsprioritising the vaccine for themselves, unfair as it may appear, is anunderstandable thing and that he is not surprised.
He also sees the vaccines overflowing to the developingnations once the entire populations of developed nations is vaccinated, “Thefact that now we’re vaccinating 30-year-olds in the UK and the US and we don’thave all the 60-year-olds in Brazil and South Africa vaccinated, that’s notfair, but within three or four months the vaccine allocation will be getting toall the countries that have the very severe epidemic”
All in all, ruthless as the comments of Bill Gates appear,from the point-of-view of the rich nations and their duty towards theircitizens, all these make sense.