Universal access to vaccines in post-COVID bioeconomy: Redesign for variants of concern and patent protection

ABSTRACT

The new global eco-social and economic conditions, aggravated by extreme poverty, accelerated urbanization and intensification of populational mobility into disruptive ecological niches, have had a dramatic impact on the patterns of infectious disease emergence and transmission worldwide. These changing conditions, in spite of all alerts from scientists since the 1990s, have favored the emergence of pandemic or potentially pandemic diseases such as COVID-19 and their related variants. This scenario has been aggravated by the highly restricted global access to COVID-19 vaccine doses, with 75% of doses currently concentrated in just 10 developed countries and by the extremely low availability of the Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (IFA) restricted to few manufacturers, mainly in 2 countries India and China. This extreme concentration has been intensified by bans and restrictions to vaccine exports by several countries (United States, European Union and India). In this chapter the authors alert on the dramatic consequences of this extreme concentration scenario, since universal access to vaccines is the only way to achieve herd immunity from immunization. They also alert that probably COVID-19 will persist in seasonal outbreaks, in the same way as Influenza, requiring annual immunizations for vaccine and vaccine redesign for new variants, which supports the crucial importance of universal access to vaccines. This need for vaccine development and redesign will require, besides innovation strategies, an exponential increase in funding and novel incentives for vaccine innovation and development ("patent pools” and awards), supported by technological transfer agreements to developing countries' manufacturers. We discuss SARS-CoV-2 variants and nucleic acid COVID-19 vaccine technologies, examining applied patents in the world and BRICS' countries applications. © 2023 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.