Polio kills or paralyzes hundreds of thousands of children every year. To global acclaim, in 1953 the American virologist Jonas Salk announced that his team had succeeded in creating the first vaccine against the disease. Asked on television who the owner of the patent was, Salk responded with one of the most famous phrases in the history of science: “Well, the people I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”
The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has been a very different story. The revenue of US multinational pharmaceutical giants Pfizer and Moderna, as well as Germany’s BioNTech, derived from Covid-19 vaccine sales is estimated at €62 billion ($70.2 billion), according to calculations by Spanish business and finance newspaper Cinco Días.
The microbiologist María Elena Bottazzi, by contrast, proposes a return to Salk’s philosophy. Her team has developed a new Covid-19 vaccine and is offering it to the people, patent-free. India has already granted it emergency use authorization.
Bottazzi, 56, co-directs the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development and is the Associate Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, two private non-profit institutions based in Houston. The researcher, who was born in the Italian city of Genoa and grew up in Honduras, says that Corbevax is “the world’s Covid-19 vaccine.” Bottazzi hopes that other countries – Indonesia, Bangladesh and Botswana – will soon follow India’s lead.
The vaccine was developed using a process employed for decades for the hepatitis B vaccine, meaning there are plenty of manufacturers with the ability to produce it, at a cost of a little over a dollar per dose. According to a press release from the Texas Children’s Hospital, Corbevax is up to 90% effective against the original coronavirus (the Ancestral-Wuhan strain), although details of the clinical trials have not yet been published. “Now we are confirming its effectiveness against the omicron variant, but we believe it will maintain a good level of protection,” says Bottazzi.
Question. You have said that Corbevax is “the world’s vaccine.” Does that mean that those made by Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca and Janssen are not for the world?
Answer. We say it is for the world because the capacity to produce it on a sufficient scale to cover global requirements is there. The technology to produce it already exists in various parts of the world. If Brazil wants to start producing it tomorrow, they have the technology, the factories and the know-how. Any manufacturer who can produce hepatitis B vaccines can produce this vaccine on a vast scale. That is the concept of the world’s vaccine. What I have seen with the other vaccines is that although the intention is that the whole world should have access to them, there are limitations when it comes to large-scale production, storage and intellectual property. There are many more limitations that are preventing these vaccines from being produced and received across the world.
Q. You are determined not to earn a single dollar from your vaccine?
A. Our technology is open. All of the processes have been published and
