Bill Gates's comments against sharing Covid-19 vaccine tech with India: a chain of events

Bill Gates, Microsoft founder and co-chairman of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Photo: AFP/Ludovic Marin

As the Covid-19 pandemic rages on, many developing countries including severely-hit India are facing challenges in vaccinating their populations. In this context, a comment by Bill Gates in an April 25 interview with the British broadcaster Sky News has not gone down well. When asked if the intellectual property rights should be shared with developing countries, he simply replied ‘no'. What ruffled feathers more was the example he gave of India at a time when the country is struggling to bring the disease under control.

In his explanation, Gates said, "The thing that's holding things back, in this case, is not intellectual property. It's not like there's some idle vaccine factory, with regulatory approval, that makes magically safe vaccines." He added, "There's only so many vaccine factories in the world and people are very serious about the safety... Moving a vaccine, say, from a [Johnson & Johnson] factory into a factory in India, it's novel, it's only because of our grants and expertise that can happen at all."

United Nations on India's capability

Gates's claim is debatable as two months ago UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was quoted as having called India a global leader in pandemic response efforts for offering 2 lakh Covid doses for the UN Peacekeepers. Further, his claim about vaccine production in developing nations and India being possible only with the help of America or his grants and expertise is different from what he indicated earlier in 2020.

Indian pharma and 'vaccines for the entire world'

In July 2020, the tech mogul had said that the Indian pharmaceutical industry is capable of producing vaccines not just for India but for the entire world, according to a PTI report. He had also said that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is a "partner with the government, particularly with the department of biotechnology, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and the office of the principal scientific advisor [to] provide advice and help about getting these tools going".

A few months later in December 2020, the Microsoft co-founder had said, "Sadly, the next four to six months could be the worst of the pandemic." In the same interview with CNN, he also said, "the US has benefited from other countries' work and we shouldn't be entirely selfish in how we go forward."

Profitability and philanthropy

Bill Gates's comments about not sharing the intellectual property rights with developing countries has also led people to believe that he made vaccine production about profit-making rather than equity. An Australian Fair Trade & Investment Network Ltd (AFTINET) report from October 2020 talks about the involvement of Bill Gates through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in the partnership between the University of Oxford with AstraZeneca to deliver Covid-19 vaccines. It mentions that their involvement was one reason for the exclusive license-controlled distribution model, instead of an open model for any manufacturer.

India's patent on the ICMR-Bharat Biotech vaccine

India has so far not waived the patent on Bharat Biotech's Covaxin jab, which was jointly developed with the ICMR. As the research involved public money, the intellectual property rights of Covaxin are likely with the government. Public health experts and economists have called upon the government to license the production of Covaxin to, and share know-how with, more pharmaceutical companies within India and abroad. This will help raise production and supply levels.

Predicting the next outbreak in 2015

Five years before the Covid pandemic rattled the world, Bill Gates had spoken about the possibility of a pandemic in a TED talk. Even though the reference has given rise to conspiracy theories, in the talk titled, "The next outbreak? We're not ready', he had said, "If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, it's likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war … Not missiles, but microbes." The video was widely circulated in March 2020.

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in India

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has reportedly invested more in India than any other country in the world, besides the US. It started work in India in 2003, according to gatesfoundation.org. The foundation first launched Avahan, an HIV prevention programme and later tied up with the Government of India to help fight polio. Their stated efforts in the country include improving health outcomes by reducing maternal and child mortality rate, improving nutrition services, and increasing immunisation coverage. However, the foundation's past work sparked concerns that Indians were being used as "guinea pigs". A 2011 investigation by The Independent found that hundreds of tribal girls in India had been recruited without parental consent for an immunisation study sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on the nod of the warden of their government hostel.