As the world stood still in lockdown in April 2020, a group of Oxford researchers packed the cell cultures needed to make their experimental coronavirus vaccine and quietly shipped them to India’s Serum Institute.
The scientists were worried that the university’s prospective partner, AstraZeneca, eager to control the intellectual property behind the shot, would stop them, and that their vaccine would never reach the poorer nations that most needed it, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.
In the case of AstraZeneca, their fears would prove to be unfounded. Oxford and the Anglo-Swedish drugmaker have since signed a licensing deal with Serum and produced hundreds of millions of doses of the cheap, portable jab for middle and lower-income countries.
But with hindsight, the covert shipment, intended to guarantee the mass production of Covid-19 shots at low costs, was an opening salvo in the fraught battle over intellectual property and technology transfer in which the world is now embroiled.
“We considered the risk of [Serum] going rogue and we didn’t want that to happen,” Oxford’s Sandy Douglas, one of the researchers developing the shot, told the Financial Times. “But that doesn’t mean we weren’t conscious AstraZeneca might have had a different view and that it might have preferred to have total control.”
The pharma group deserved “credit”, Douglas said. “Once [AstraZeneca] got over their initial hesitance, they really did run with the tech transfer to poorer nations,” he said. AstraZeneca, Oxford and the Serum Institute declined to comment.
But few other pharma companies have done the same, and when India and South Africa approached the World Trade Organization in October last year with a proposal to suspend intellectual property rights for all Covid-related drugs and technology, it was quickly shot down. Such a move would make it easier and cheaper for third parties to manufacture the most successful vaccines and treatments, thereby boosting and diversifying production, India and South Africa said.
The pharmaceutical industry has countered that waiving patents, which it says are necessary to protect the investment needed to bring drugs to market, would not lead to more doses. Pharma executives say they are already doing everything possible to scale up production and that third-party manufacturers lack the experience and knowhow needed to produce complex vaccines without help.
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