In a recent interview, Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft was asked if he would share the recipe of the COVID vaccine to the developing nations. In response to this, the billionaire disagreed and said that he will not roll out the formula of the coronavirus vaccine.
According to sources, supporting his response Gates explained, “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.”
“It’s not as simple as just sharing a recipe — the drug needs to be tried and tested and for this, the manufacturing process has to be done with extreme caution, “The thing that’s holding things back, in this case, is not intellectual property. It’s not like there’s some idle vaccine factory, with regulatory approval, that makes magically safe vaccines. You know, you’ve got to do the trial on these things. And every manufacturing process needs to be looked at in a very careful way,” Gates added.
Gates further stated that he wasn’t surprised to see rich nations prioritising the vaccine for themselves, while also stating that developing nations will get their hands on the vaccine once the developed nations are done getting vaccinated. “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 explained.
