Andrew StroehleinVerified account

You already know that, from the beginning, some rich governments have been blocking wider vaccine production globally by obstructing the #TRIPSwaiver, a proposal to temporarily waive some intellectual property rules on vaccines & other health products...https://twitter.com/astroehlein/status/1470696943605239809 …

Experts looked at companies around the world. To get on the list, a manufacturer not only had to be producing sterile injectables, but ALSO had to have exported them successfully to the EU or US, or been evaluated by the World Health Organisation.

The EU, US & WHO have high standards for what they call “good manufacturing practices”. What this means is that, before a drug can be sold in the EU or US, or through the WHO, the factory that made it has to be certified for meeting these gold-standard quality requirements.

In other words: the companies on the list are, for example, already making jabs that go into arms in the EU every day, so the EU authorities cannot say these companies don’t meet safety requirements.

But the mRNA vaccines themselves? Aren’t they super-complicated to make? Now, here’s the fact that may surprise you the most: mRNA vaccines are actually EASIER to make than any of the older-generation vaccines.

Of course, no one is saying you and I can cook up these things in our kitchens, but making mRNA vaccines is a CHEMICAL process, and for a qualified, experienced, pharmaceutical manufacturer like those on this list, it ultimately does come down to following a recipe.

Older-type vaccines are much more complicated to manufacture, because they require BIOLOGICAL processes. You’ve got to keep cells or other biological organisms alive and uniform; however, these things grow and can change as they grow. It’s very tricky.

And until last year, all vaccines produced anywhere in the world involved the growing of cells or some kind of biological organism.

Some of these older-type vaccine-production processes even require you to keep live pathogens, meaning the bio-security level of manufacturing facilities has to be extremely high. Not so with mRNA vaccines.

The relative ease of manufacture for mRNA vaccines means MANY companies around the world could be making them. Experts found 120 firms, in fact. With constant global vaccine shortages, just imagine how different our situation would be if they were allowed to make them…

It helps to think of the drug industry as a 3-tiered pyramid… At the top, you have a few vaccine manufacturers, who can produce vaccines with the OLD-style technology. In the middle, you have a few more who can produce biologics, a class of drugs very similar to vaccines.

At the foundation of the pyramid, there are a large number of companies that make chemistry-based pharmaceuticals. Any company in this layer that also makes injectable drugs – as many of them do – can theoretically make an mRNA vaccine.

Many existing manufacturers have facilities for producing chemistry-based pharmaceuticals as sterile injectables. If only they: 1) had the recipe, and 2) were not blocked by intellectual property rules, they could be producing vaccines in 3 to 6 months.

It’s just another disingenuous excuse, like all the rest of the lies and disinformation the EU has spread about the #TRIPSwaiver for ages.https://twitter.com/astroehlein/status/1400352366134796295 …

So, what about licensing? Companies like BioNTech, Pfizer & Moderna could & should be licensing other companies outside Europe and the US to make their vaccines right now… …but the fact is, they’re doing very little.

And for all the talk from the US and German governments about vaccinating the world, they’ve not put enough pressure on these companies to do what the world needs them to.

Creating easy & fast compulsory licensing norms – a legal measure by which the patent monopoly is overridden – is an option that countries could use to achieve something close to this effect, as a new Brazilian law has done…

As a start, these companies could license their vaccines to the World Health Organization’s mRNA production hub in South Africa - given that we now have a potentially more dangerous variant, #Omicron, detected in the region.

And why stop there? Many of the 120 manufacturers we’ve identified here could be licensed to make these mRNA vaccines, and in fact, doing so would be a direct way to ensure the world makes billions more vaccine doses as quickly as possible.

But even short of such full cooperation by the monopolies, there are ways to obtain the recipe, at least. The #TRIPSwaiver, in fact, has ingenious provisions to transfer the vaccine recipe to interested manufacturers, whether the originators of the vaccines want that or not.

The way the waiver would do this is to give regulators – the equivalents of the US Food and Drug Administration or the European Medicines Agency – permission to share the dossier they receive from Moderna or Pfizer/BioNTech for approval.

Normally, regulators keep these dossiers confidential. Under a TRIPs waiver, in the way it was originally proposed, willing regulators would be able to share this recipe with other capable manufacturers without retaliation.

Of course, the TRIPS waiver & technology transfers are complementary measures. In other words, we will still need collaboration from originator companies, or the possibility of having expert human assistance from them, and…

…that’s why we’re calling for Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech to join the WHO hub and engage in bilateral technology transfers with as many of the companies we have identified in our list as possible.

All these combined actions - the TRIPs waiver proposal, the call for more licensing of vaccine technology, and the identification of these 120 companies that can make an mRNA vaccine - will push originator companies into working more collaboratively.

In the end, it comes down to this: There are 120 manufacturers out there that could help humanity end the global pandemic by bringing new vaccine production online to address the global vaccine shortage. Why are we preventing them from helping us?

Rather than make more & more hollow excuses for their current deadly policy, the EU should aim to END the pandemic using every tool possible, including the #TRIPSwaiver. Humanity is facing a once-in-a-lifetime crisis of epic proportions. It’s not time for “business as usual”.