Ellen ‘t Hoen points out that the pharmaceutical companies have not paid for everything themselves: “The financing of the vaccines also contains a lot of government money.” Germany, for example, decided in September to grant a 750 million euro subsidy to BioNTech, which is collaborating with Pfizer, and CureVac, which is working on another vaccine.
‘t Hoen: “Governments could have said that the vaccines should be on the market at a low price and that they should have shared the knowledge, but as far as we know that has not happened.”
Scarcity
For the Netherlands, there is no immediate problem of scarcity with corona vaccines. Through deals with six manufacturers, the Netherlands has options for enough vaccines for about 29 million people, more than the number of inhabitants of the Netherlands. It should be noted, however, that all six vaccines must work and be approved for this. That is not yet the case.
The problem with too few vaccines mainly occurs outside the Western world. Of the 1.3 billion vaccines that Pfizer says it will deliver next year, 80 percent will go to the EU, the United Kingdom, the US, Canada and Japan.
It TRIPS treaty of the World Trade Organization says compulsory licensing should be primarily for the domestic market of the country that imposes the compulsory license. But the treaty also provides that countries in which medicines are produced can impose a compulsory license for export to countries without a medicine industry.
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