The 'People's Vaccine' Approach

Gabriel Scally (University of Bristol and a member of the Independent/ unofficial SAGE group) strongly advocates dropping objections to patent waivers on Covid-19 vaccines (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/apr/18/patent-waiver-covid-vaccines-uk-variants). Scally notes the EU, UK and US have all currently voted against patent waivers. The EU, UK and US are, of course, entities whose pharmaceutical companies can profit from vaccine sales. These drug companies carried out much of the research and would normally benefit from their intellectual property rights. Waivers would, however, allow vaccine production in any country with facilities for its production. This 'people's vaccine' approach would greatly speed up the rate at which people received vaccinations, especially in the poorer parts of the world. Scally reiterates that none of us will be really safe from Sars-CoV-2, until the virus is suppressed across the entire globe. Otherwise, Sars-CoV-2 is given multiple opportunities to mutate. Mutants could even infect populations of countries with a good, current vaccine roll-outs. I don't think this can be described as 'scare mongering'!