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.”