Open-Source Vaccines Got More Funding From Tito's Vodka Than the Government
https://www.vice.com/en/article/akvk9j/open-source-vaccines-got-more-funding-from-titos-vodka-than-the-government
Corbevax is targeting low-income countries to stop new COVID variants from emerging. Scientists say rich countries are still refusing to fund it.
With the Omicron variant spreading across the US at an unprecedented speed, medical experts have reignited their calls for mass-producing patent-free COVID-19 vaccines to address the lack of widely-available vaccines in low-income countries. But two scientists in Texas who have successfully developed such a vaccine say their effort still hasn’t received any funding from the world’s richest countries, including the United States.
Dr. Peter Hotez and Dr. Maria Elena Bottazzi are professors at the Baylor College of Medicine and co-directors of the Texas Children’s Center for Vaccine Development, where they are renewing their pleas for the US federal government and other G7 countries to financially support the mass production of Corbevax, the world’s first open-source, patent-free COVID-19 vaccine being distributed on a mass scale.
Virologists have frequently noted that new variants like Omicron are more likely to emerge in countries where vaccines aren’t widely available—a problem that vaccine patents exacerbate, and that efforts like Corbevax aim to directly address. Without vaccine equity, low-income nations suffer from the virus disproportionately, all the while increasing the chances that the pandemic will continue indefinitely.
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Interesting article about the priority of funding from our and other institutions.
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