Bill Gates Says It’s Too Difficult To Share Covid Vaccine Formulas With Developing Countries

BILL GATES has said that it is too difficult to share Covid-19 vaccine formulas with developing countries.

Bill Gates has spoken about pandemic preparedness for years and famously gave a TED talk in 2015 warning of the potentially huge death toll a global pandemic could cause.

As Covid-19 vaccines now roll out in response to the ongoing global pandemic, Gates is being accused of refusing to give vaccine formulas to developing nations following his response in a recent interview.

One headline reads: “Bill Gates says no to sharing vaccine formulas with global poor to end pandemic.”

“Bill Gates under fire for saying vaccine formulas shouldn’t be shared with developing world,” reads another.

Both pieces refer back to a Sky News interview with Gates that took place this week, in which Gates is asked if it would be helpful to change the intellectual property law to enable “the recipe for these vaccines to be shared.”

Gates answered: “No,” which, if taken at face value, could be interpreted as him refusing to share vaccine formulas with developing nations. However, Gates continues to answer the obvious follow-up question: “Why not?”

Gates said the reason is because of how complex and difficult it is to manufacture safe vaccines.

“There are only so many vaccine factories in the world, and people are very serious about the safety of vaccines,” he said.

“The thing that’s holding things back, in this case, isn’t intellectual property. It’s not like there’s some idle vaccine factory with regulatory approval that makes magically safe vaccines. You’ve gotta do the trials on these things. And every manufacturing process has to be looked at in a very careful way.”

Gates also said Covid vaccine manufacturers like Moderna, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer sharing vaccine formulas to developing nations has already happened, for example, in India.

Gates said: “We got all the rights from the vaccine companies,”

“They didn’t hold it back, they were participating.”

Source: Business Insider