Pfizer didn’t create its COVID vaccine alone
Yet it’s holding tight to its life-saving information—and its record-breaking profits.
As of mid-February, 62 percent of the world’s population has received at least one dose of a COVID vaccine. The Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator, a global initiative backed by the World Health Organization, has delivered a half billion donated doses to poor countries. Another WHO-sponsored initiative has helped the South African company Afrigen formulate a new vaccine for Africa.
But these promising developments exist within a troubling context: the inequity that has plagued the vaccine rollout from the start. Rich countries have an 80 percent vaccination rate; in poor countries it’s 11 percent. Poor countries are still hurting for both vaccine doses and distribution networks—and the ACT Accelerator is hurting for cash, having received just 5 percent of the grants it expected from rich countries.
As for Afrigen, Bloomberg reports that the team in South Africa spent precious resources piecing together a replica of the Moderna vaccine from bits of public information. That’s because the big pharmaceutical companies that own the existing intellectual property persist in refusing to share it. They continue to guard both their formulas and their logistical expertise as they focus on selling their own products.
