COVID-19 vaccines: Open source licensing could keep Big Pharma from making huge profits off taxpayer-funded research
An international, multi-billion-dollar race is underway to develop a COVID-19 vaccine, and progress is moving at record speed, but with nationalistic, competitive undertones. If and when an effective vaccine is invented, its production will require an unprecedented effort to vaccinate people across the globe.
However, for the country that invents a safe and effective vaccine, at least in the urgent short term, it will be politically difficult to export vaccines before their own population is immunized. “The only solution,” vaccine development scientist Sandy Douglas told The New York Times, “is to make a hell of a lot of vaccine in a lot of different places.” But how?
Having the public sector fund contracts with vaccine makers is a key component to meeting this future, unprecedented, dis...