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Profiting from the pandemic
At the start of the coronavirus crisis, the World Health Organization had a great idea: a shared Covid-19 technology access scheme.
The WHO set up a tech platform that would encourage pharmaceutical companies to pool data and knowledge and then license vaccine production and transfer technology to other producers.
If more companies started sharing knowledge and technology, the logic went, then more vaccines would be produced at a fairer price, and more people would have access to them.
It didn’t work. Guess how many pharmaceutical companies have joined the scheme? That’s right: not a single one.