Simplifying it to being an IP issue when both Moderna and AstraZeneca-Oxford's vaccines can be manufactured without violating patents doesn't do anything to fix the issues with manufacturing capacity.
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I don't claim to be any kind of expert on manufacturing, but the fiasco with trying to rapidly expand J&J production capacity and ending up having to toss millions of doses shows how complex the whole thing is.
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In any event, the situation in India seems to be partly a function of the Modi government overestimating vaccine manufacturing capacity, including declaring that they didn't need Pfizer, causing Pfizer to withdraw their EUA applications back in January.https://science.thewire.in/health/narendra-modi-government-overestimated-india-covid-vaccine-manufacturing-capacity-shortage/ …
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Evidently the big issue in terms of manufacturing capacity estimates is that preexisting WHO pandemic capacity estimates were based on switching over from multi-strain flu shots to single strain pandemic vaccines, but India primarily manufactures childhood vaccines, not flu shots
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Apparently switching over from childhood vaccines to covid shots doesn't increase capacity like switching from flu shots to covid shots, and the Modi government failed to consider that in their capacity estimates until it was too late and they were having shortages.
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As per that article, India decided on the 19th to fasttrack approval of foreign vaccines that were already approved in Japan, Europe and the US so that they can start importing other vaccines. Before then, other countries couldn't export their vaccines even if they wanted to.
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TL;DR, this isn't an intellectual property issue, it's a global vaccine infrastructure issue, and energy would better be spent lobbying wealthy countries to drastically expand their manufacturing infrastructure, whether for raw materials or vaccines themselves.
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And as I said, the issue of pharma patents is one I'll rant about all day every day, and it certainly wouldn't be a bad thing if Pfizer and J&J joined Moderna in waiving patent enforcement, but this isn't a scenario where it's going to do much because that's not the bottleneck.
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Nothing new here, no? This is dated Oct 2020, moderna took this stance quite early in the pandemic
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