The United States announced that it will share the patent of a key technology to manufacture covid-19 vaccines with the World Health Organization (WHO)which can help other countries to develop their own doses.
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The National Institutes of Health (NIH) will issue a license to share several technologies with the WHO, including the stabilized protein S patent, which has helped manufacture several covid-19 vaccines, such as those of Pfizer and Moderna.
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This was announced by US President Joe Biden during his speech at the second world summit on covid-19, which is being held virtually and is co-chaired by the United States, Belize, Germany, Indonesia and Senegal.
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“We are going to make available (to the OMS) health technologies owned by the United States government, including stabilized protein S, which has been used in many COVID-19 vaccines,” Biden said in a videotaped speech broadcast during the summit.
The S or spike protein is the one used by the coronavirus to enter the human celland the messenger RNA it produces is the basis of several of the most widely used vaccines, such as those from Pfizer and Moderna.
However, these two US pharmaceutical companies have so far refused to share the specific technology behind their vaccines, despite repeated requests from the WHO.
The NIH will assign its license on protein S to the WHO Medicines Patent Fund (MPP), in an agreement to share with that entity a total of 11 US government patents related to covid-19.
That “will enable manufacturers around the world to work” with the MPP to develop new products and vaccines, the WHO said in a statement. Biden already expressed his support a year ago for a proposal in the World Trade Organization (WTO) to suspend the intellectual property of vaccines against covid-19, but an agreement has not yet been reached within that forum.
During the virtual summit this Thursday, financial commitments worth more than 3,000 million dollars (2,880 million euros) were gathered to continue fighting the pandemic and prepare for other possible ones that may arrive in the future, according to the White House.
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Of that sum, 962 million dollars (924 million euros), almost half contributed by the United States, will go to a new global security and pandemic preparedness fund that the World Bank (BM) will launch in the middle of this year.
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