Don’t share COVID vaccine formula with India: Bill Gates

Multi-billionaire, philanthropist, and the co-founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates made controversial comments regarding the patents in vaccine manufacture. He is against the idea of sharing the vaccine formulae with developing countries like India.

In an interview with Sky News, Gates was asked if it would be possible to change the intellectual property law in order to share the formula for COVID vaccines. Gates said, “Well, there’s only so many vaccine factories in the world and people are very serious about the safety of vaccines. And moving something that had never been done… moving vaccine, say, a from a (Johnson & Johnson) factory into a factory in India…its novel… it’s only because of our grants and expertise that can happen at all.”

“Global vaccine rollout is not intellectual property. It’s not like there’s some idle vaccine factory, with regulatory approval, that makes magically safe vaccines. You know, you’ve got to do the trail on these things. Every manufacturing process needs to be looked at in a very careful way,” he further added.

Gates is now facing backlash from people for making such comments when a country like India is suffering from the COVID-19 crisis. There is a heavy surge in the cases and we are witnessing more than 400,000 positive cases every day. Every country needs to step in this need of the hour to help India. Thus, people are criticizing Gates for his statements.