Patent waivers may not lead to quick access

NEW DELHI: The waiving off of patents alone is unlikely to help improve vaccine availability anytime soon, scientists, legal experts and pharma industry executives said, pointing to the complicated technical knowhow, raw materials and infrastructure required to make vaccines while ensuring they are as safe and effective as the original developer intended it to be.

Several countries, including the US, France and the European Union are considering backing efforts countries such as India and South Africa for a global waiver of coronavirus vaccine patents to boost supplies.

While such a move could well be the first step in broadening access, patents alone do little to allow someone else to make biological therapeutics such as vaccines, unlike in the case of generic drugs, which are chemicals and can be replicated more easily with a recipe book of sorts. “Patents are a way of protection of your intellectual and commercial information, speaking from a legal point of view.

But just by reading a patent, does not necessarily offer the ability to replicate the product or the process, because while a patent does share a lot of the generic information, it protects the specifics, and it is not a selfguide,” said Prabuddha Kundu, co-founder and managing director at Premas Biotech, which is working on an oral Covid-19 vaccine.