Vaccine development is extraordinarily expensive and that has to be paid for somehow. These IP partnerships and cooperatives had zero funding. If the Oxford group has made their vaccine public domain, who would have made it? None of the big pharma companies would do it for free, and they’re the only ones that have the capacity and expertise to ramp up production at massive scale, so it would have either sat there unused or small quantities of questionable quality would have eventually been made by small players, without the expertise or scale to make a significant difference quickly.

It’s all about funding. If you want to replace the big pharma system fine, go right ahead. Knock yourself out, I’ve just got one question. Where’s the funding coming from?

The fact is no such massive scaled up alternate funded solution exists, and it didn’t exist last April. What does exist, and did exist from the beginning of the pandemic, that could be swung into action rapidly and effectively was the existing system. It was ready and waiting to rapidly develop, test, ramp up production and deliver billions of doses of half a dozen different vaccines, with the first hundreds of millions of doses for delivery in under a year.

April last years was not the time to convene committees of UN functionaries about patent cooperatives or whatever. It was time to get to work.

Now the future is a different story. Maybe pharma development should be reformed. Maybe you have ideas about better ways to fund it. Fine. Last April was not the time for that, but maybe now is.