Humanity before profit
There are 4.1 billion people in the world who are still not fully vaccinated against COVID -19. Even with the U. S. and European Union planning to donate 1.5 billion doses to poorer countries, much of humanity is likely to still be vulnerable for at least another year.
And a pandemic that has already brought so much human suffering and economic turmoil will endure.
With just 35 percent of the global population fully vaccinated so far, the goal of getting to 70 percent by this time next year seems dim. Even the United States hasn’t reached that number, still stuck around 56 percent thanks largely to vaccine resistance and politicians and social influencers who have helped make it such a divisive issue.
And the 35 percent global figure doesn’t tell the whole story of the vast disparities among nations. The oilrich United Emirates leads the world at 85 percent. China, populous as it is, is at 75 percent. But less-affluent nations are well below 50 percent, and the poorest ones are in the teens and single digits. Most of Africa is nowhere near the 10 percent goal that was thought possible by now; some countries haven’t reached even 1 percent.
And as we have seen from the beginning of this crisis, we — all us humans — are in this together. The virus, remember, spread globally from one city in China. Its variants appear to emerge and spread in areas with low vaccination rates.
Amid a pressing need to accelerate production and distribution of the vaccines, we can’t help but recall — as many others have — how another vaccine in another time was handled very differently. Jonas Salk, who developed the first effective vaccine against polio in 1952 at a time when the crippling disease infected as many as 52,000 children annually in the United States alone, opted not to patent the drug, famously remarking in an interview, “Could you patent the sun?” That decision allowed the vaccine to be widely produced without the added cost of royalties.
A team of scientists from the University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center is taking a similar approach now in developing a COVID -19 treatment that they reported recently is nearly ready for clinical trials. Their goal is to make it available license-free to any drug manufacturer.
There has been talk of an intellectual property waiver for COVID -19 vaccines by the World Trade Organization, and the United States is among the nations to support it. But a decision is still at least several months off.
More nations need to get on board. And the pharmaceutical industry needs to put the wellbeing of our species above profits. Even a patent waiver won’t immediately get everyone vaccinated; plants would still need to be financed and built and vaccination programs would need to be developed where they barely exist now, if at all.
But imagine how much more quickly the world could be vaccinated, this virus defeated, and this pandemic and all its misery put behind us if the corporations that hold the patents were to forgo their fees and allow these drugs to be more widely produced.
We have already lost more than 4.8 million people to this disease. We have the means to bring it under control. The world’s leaders should waste no more time.