Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates took everyone by surprise when he said no to lifting patents to share vaccine formulas with the developing world.
During an interview with Sky News on April 27, the billionaire philanthropist was asked if it would be helpful to change intellectual property law in order to enable “the recipe for these vaccines to be shared.”
Gates replied “No,” before explaining: “There's only so many vaccine factories in the world and people are very serious about the safety of vaccines. And so moving something that had never been done, moving a vaccine, 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 at all.
“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,” he further said.
Gates also stated that he wasn’t surprised to see rich nations prioritizing the vaccine for themselves.
“The fact that now we're vaccinating 30-year-olds in the UK and the US and we don't have all the 60-year-olds in Brazil and South Africa vaccinated, that's not fair, but within three or four months the vaccine allocation will be getting to all the countries that have the very severe epidemic,” he said.
Earlier, in 2015, Bill Gates in a TED talk had warned of the potentially staggering death toll a worldwide pandemic could create.
