By Ila Ananya
Yesterday, the World Health Organisation announced that none of the 40 potential Zika virus vaccines being tested are likely to be available for women before 2020, three years from now. WHO director Margaret Chan said that, “a vaccine judged safe enough for use in women of childbearing age may not be fully licensed before 2020,” even though there have been efforts towards prevention.
The Zika outbreak had emerged in Brazil in 2015, and even though it was announced in November 2016 that Zika wasn’t a public health emergency, it has gone on to affect women in almost 70 countries. In June, the WHO had announced that $122 million was needed to fund an 18-month plan to fight infections that affect women of childbearing age.
In December last year, however, there was talk about the US Army granting exclusive rights to a promising Zika vaccine to Sanofi Pasteur, of the French multinational pharmaceutical company Sanofi. This decision came under severe criticism, since it would allow Sanofi the patent license, giving it exclusive rights to make, use and sell the Zika vaccine for the next 20 years.
This could, as humanitarian aid organisation Medecins Sans Frontieres argues, give the company a monopoly on the drug, with no incentive to make it affordable. Apart from this, Sanofi could even choose to stop making the vaccine if they didn’t think it was a good idea commercially. Instead, they asked for the US Army to grant an open and non-exclusive patent license instead, pushing companies to further try and develop a vaccine, and also bring down its price.
Now, more than ever, there is an immediate need with all these hindrances to develop a vaccine. As the Washington Post reports, Zika has been stumping the medical community due to its unpredictable nature and shortening time frame as “vaccines usually take at least a decade to develop because so much of the effort is trial-and-error”.