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Ten Covid-19 vaccines could be available by the middle of next year if they get regulatory approval, but their inventors need patent protection, the head of the global group said on Friday. pharmaceutical industry.
Vaccines from Pfizer and BioNtech, as well as Moderna and AstraZeneca have shown promising results in large clinical trials, but there is no question of “cutting corners,” said Thomas Cueni, executive director of the International Federation of associations and manufacturers of pharmaceutical products (IFPMA).
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“So far, 3 we have 3 out of 3 were successful. I would expect we would see something similar with Johnson & Johnson, I would expect us to see similar positive results with Novavax, and many more, Sanofi Pasteur, GSK are in there, Merck “, did he declare.
Large pharmaceutical and biotech companies have invested heavily in research and development and boosting manufacturing during the pandemic to be able to deploy vaccine doses, Cueni said at a press briefing in Geneva.
It would be a mistake to lift patent protection to allow compulsory licenses and try to make vaccines that require such complex quality assurance without expert staff and quality control procedures, he said.
“We hope that next summer we will probably have 10 proven vaccines. But all really need to be subjected to rigorous scientific scrutiny by regulators.
At the World Trade Organization (WTO), India and South Africa have proposed allowing a temporary waiver to allow compulsory licenses for patented products during the pandemic. The United States, the European Union, Switzerland and others have rejected it, trade officials say.
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Cueni, when asked about the proposal, said: “For me, this questioning of intellectual property is really primarily political, but it is politics that is not useful because it would send very negative signals in terms of of disrespect for the system that allowed the world to react so quickly. and so responsibly.
Vaccine manufacturing factories often need 50 quality assurance agents performing hundreds of checks during production, he said, stressing that companies would not profit from the pandemic.
Cueni said IFPMA records showed that there had never been a compulsory license for a vaccine and pointed to the difficult technology and know-how. Almost all of the member companies had pledged to adopt “nonprofit” or socially responsible pricing during the pandemic, he added.
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