This is not the first or second time scenarios like these happened where the pharma industries tried to control medicine while millions were suffering around the world.
1. AIDS pandemic:
How INDIA Saved the World From a Pandemic
TLDR: Pharma companies were selling AIDS drugs at $8000 a year. CIPLA stepped in and sold at $1 a day.
2. In the 80s Merck and GSK had developed recombinant vaccines and held a monopoly with over 90 patents covering manufacturing processes. WHO recommended every child be vaccinated but at $US23 a dose most Indian families could not afford. Step in Shantha Biotechnics (later acquired by Sanofi). When the founder of Shantha approached a western firm for tech transfer, he was told: "even if you can afford to buy the technology your scientists cannot understand recombinant technology in the least". Shantha went on to produce India's first home-grown recombinant product at $1 a dose. The vaccine was produced in a yeast system, the first of its kind for a commercial product, and different from that used in Merck and GSK's vaccines. Because of the $1 dose price, it enabled the low-cost mass vaccination through organisations such as UNICEF.
3. When the avian flu crisis hit, Gilead/Roche drug Tamiflu was pushed as the first line treatment (later revealed to not be effective). Roche said it would be difficult for generic companies in India and the global south to synthesise the drug because of all the steps. The WSJ ran this back story in 2005 using language which questioned the claims of generic companies in the global south (nothing changes). I lived in India at the time and saw a Indian companies develop generic stockpiles of Tamiflu within months.
4. More recently with remdesivir, GileadSciences said the the production is both resource and time intensive with some manufacturing steps taking weeks to complete. By July Hetero and Cipla were ready to dispatch generic versions.
5. Wall Street Journal said this in Nov 2020:
"It’s not clear developing countries even have the ability to manufacture large-scale, complex technologies like Moderna’s mRNA vaccine or Eli Lilly’s monoclonal antibody cocktail—let alone distribute them.
Source for 2, 3, 4 & 5:
Twitter
What Bill Gates said
Interviewer: There is been some speculation that the changing intellectual property rules and allowing these vaccines, as you say the recipe for these vaccines to be shared would be helpful. Do you think that would be helpful?
Bill Gates: No. There is only so many vaccine factories in the world. People are very serious about the safety of vaccines. Moving something that had never been done, moving a factory from say a J&J factory into a factory in India, that is novel. It's only because of our grants and expertise that can happen at all. The thing that is holding this back in this case is not intellectual property. Its not like some idle vaccine factory with regulatory approval that makes magically safe vaccines. You know you got to do the trials on these things, and every manufacturing process has to be looked at in a very careful way. There is all sorts of issues around intellectual property having to do with medicines, but not in terms of how quickly we have been able to ramp up the volume here. I remember how soft people were when we said we were going to do second sources in these developing country factories, you know that was a novel thing. We got all the rights from the vaccine companies. They didn't hold it back. They were participating. I do a regular phone call with the pharmaceutical CEOs to make sure that work is going at full speed.
Source-2:20 in this video (recommended to watch the whole video):
Krystal Ball: Bill Gates Is LYING TO YOU On Vaccine Patent Protection
Also, J&J themselves had quality issues in one of their factories just last month (
source).
Johnson & Johnson suffers another setback as FDA tells Md. vaccine maker to suspend production. The pause in production follows the contamination of 15 million doses of Johnson & Johnson vaccine in March.
