News & Updates

NPR Marketplace: Waiving patents on COVID-19 vaccines no magic pill for shortage

“The U.S. government right now could basically say, hey, you’re using our technology. As a condition of this, you have to transfer the technology over,” said James Krellenstein, co-founder of the advocacy organization PrEP4All. Even if all that gets worked out, there’s the question of whether there are enough factories in the world ready and able to make these vaccines. Right now, Krellenstein said, there aren’t.  “But we know we can build new factories extraordinarily rapidly. There was not a single factory in the world in February of 2020 that could make mRNA vaccines at a commercial scale. We built those factories.” And now? It’s time to build more, Krellenstein said.