Vaccine patents should be waived (Debate-For the motion)
Answers
Answer:
Explanation:
What does this mean?
As of now, only drug companies that own patents for the vaccines are authorised to manufacture them. With the patent waiver, the secret recipes will be open to all and won’t be restricted to an embargo.
This would allow any company that has the skills and resources to make the vaccine to produce them and sell at the prices they want, resulting in more affordable and generic variants of those vaccines.
How can this help India scale up vaccine production?
Today, the only vaccines that are manufactured in India are Covishield (AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine) at the Serum Institute and Covaxin at Bharat Biotech. With the release of patents, more pharmaceutical companies in India could replicate and produce vaccines for India. We could get access to Pfizer, Moderna and even the single-dose Jansen vaccine by Johnson & Johnson.
This will allow not just to make vaccines more affordable but also deal with the global shortage of vaccines as more and more companies would be up for manufacturing them, giving more options to citizens to safeguard themselves from the novel coronavirus.