>>12890982It is. The Chinese published virus sequence pretty quickly. Takes maybe two hours in Snapgene to modify an existing construct (a la Oxford vaccine). MRNA vaccine can be designed in seconds.
For vaccines already in clinical use, it would be theoretically possible for e.g. a biopharma company in India to mass produce their own exact copy with no real effort or with little legal issue and indeed this is what they want to do. But there are still political consequences for government so they are trying to seek permission.
Fact is, the vaccine is still going to rich countries. Any promise of producing the vaccine at cost is only for the duration of pandemic. Pharma still expects to make billions from Covid and they're going to throw vast legal and political resources at making sure their vaccine is protected.
Anyway doesn't it matter as current vaccines will have significantly reduced efficacy in other strains so are already outdated. So either we end up with annual vaccines (like flu), which will be most profitable for pharma, or a strain insensitive vaccine (not targeting Corona spikes) will be developed which will be best for society but least profitable. My assumption is that such a vaccine is already in development but after initial patent being filed, clinical trials will be drawn out.
