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this post was submitted on 08 May 2025
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4$ per dose is quite a lot of money for African countries. Not patenting it would allow them to create their own, which he blocked based on bullshit reasoning.
I did try to find unit costs for Cuba's vaccine but failed. While doing that I found a paper analysing distribution costs in Vietnam and long story short it can easily cost four bucks just to get the stuff from the plant into people's arms.
Patenting it and licensing it also allows them to create their own, but now they need a plant to do that, which requires things like reliable electricity, infrastructure to enable supply of raw materials, whatnot. It's not like you can brew that kind of thing in a bathtub. What patenting also does is stop random Indian pharma producers from cooking it up and selling it to Botswana without giving you a cut, that is, the wrong private enterprise profiting off it. One that didn't incur costs doing studies so that regulators would greenlight it.
From what I gather most of the doses used overall in the world were AstraZeneca, and much of it was given to countries for free, with western countries stemming the bill, not AstraZeneca. The EU apparently (it's in your wiki link) brought the price down to €1.78 because the EU was supplying the production capacity, and €12 for Pfizer/Biontech, which was never in the race for distribution to poor countries in the first place because it requires a tight, and very cool, cooling chain. Forget about the four bucks per dose for distribution in that case.
Would this all have been better in a socialist world? Yes. But that's not what the situation on the ground was during the pandemic so stop making the perfect the enemy of the good, western countries (excluding the US) were up to the task not getting fucked over by big pharma, and passed that on to other countries.
Or NOT patenting it and open sourcing the vaccine so it doesn't cost any money for them to license and we're not gatekeeping life saving medicine. Just a thought.
See the point about random companies selling it for profit. A patent license does not have to cost anything. Don't know if AstraZeneca did give it away for free to poor countries which do happen to have the right kind of production capability under a "produce for yourself but don't sell it" kind of deal, but it's definitely a thing that you can do.
The patent itself isn't evil, it's all about how it's used. And btw open source licenses rely on copyright law, especially anything GPL-like would not work without it.
Congrats, you've done research and thus got downvoted.<_>
Sadly we don't have the specifics about what increases the price, but I think it's fair to say that they probably have an automated process of creating those vaccines, and as such, idk if other labs could create a dose for less than this amount, especially if they don't have many funds. I'd argue not, but what do I know