At least Moderna should be required to out-license and transfer technology for the manufacture (at a reasonable cost) to other manufacturers not just in US and Europe but other parts of the world. Moderna is using the tax payer funded NIAD (NIH) developed platform. Voluntary out-licensing should be required for other vaccines coming through if not then as part of their approval process. That's the only way we and the world can scale-up the manufacturing and hopefully get the pandemic under control.
Both Moderna and Pfizer would be smart to license out their vaccines to sub-contractors for increased production. Moderna was founded, in part, based on research that was funded with money from NIAID. I don't know any details, but there may already be such an agreement between Moderna and the US government.
Moreoever, with the new variants popping up, I am increasingly convinced we will live with this virus just the flu. Just like the flu the Covid vaccine will have to customized each year for the prevalent strains. Flu vaccine does not have a patent so should some of the Covid vaccine technologies. Alternately, WHO should buy out the patent/s with IMF money.
I agree we will have to live with this virus. It doesn't seem like it will go away on it's own.
Corona viruses are different from influenza viruses in one important feature. Corona viruses have a single strand of RNA as their genome. All of the virus's genes are encoded on that one piece of RNA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus#Genome
Influenza A viruses have their genes on 8 different pieces of RNA. Different influenza viruses have different hemagglutinin (H) and neuraminidase (N) proteins on the surface of the virus particle. For example, the H5N1 virus designates an influenza A subtype that has a type 5 H protein and a type 1 N protein. There are 18 known types of H and 11 known types of N, so, in theory, 198 different combinations of these proteins are possible. But usually H1, H2, H3, N1 and N2 are commonly found in humans. These H and N proteins are usually the targets for host cells to bind and trigger an immune response.
The genes for the H and N proteins are located on different pieces of the influenza virus genome. Usually there are more than one strain of influenza virus around in any single season. It is easy for a single host cell to be infected with more than one strain at a time. The virus particles created during the infection must have all 8 pieces of the virus genome, but it doesn't matter if 8 pieces come from the same or different strains. As a result, it is much easier for new influenza strains to develop each year. These new strains aren't simple point mutations, they have fully different H and/or N proteins in combinations that our immune systems haven't seen before.
In comparison, the point mutations we've seen in corona virus since the pandemic began were much slower to occur. And these mutations result, so far, in Spike proteins that can still be recognized from vaccines based on the original strain.
en.wikipedia.org
