Pharmaceutical companies insist secrecy is the only way. But what if they were obliged to share recipes and supply chains?
Biolyse is a small pharmaceutical manufacturer in Canada with a simple proposition: provide a recipe for a coronavirus vaccine, and it will produce 20m doses for nations in the global south. It has approached AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson, and even asked the Canadian government to help it with compulsory licensing – which would give it the authorisation to produce another company’s patented product for emergency use – but so far no one has taken up its offer.
When I reached him by phone this week, John Fulton, the vice-president of Biolyse, told me: “We’ve been passed over. We’ve got this production capacity and it’s not being put to use. If we had started this last year, we could have shipped millions of doses by now. This is supposed to be like a wartime effort, everyone in it together. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.”
Stephen Buranyi is a writer specialising in science and the environment
