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When will the Covid-19 vaccine arrive? This is the question that has been placed at the center of all the reasoning that governments, large and small companies, families are making to organize some plan for a future never so full of unknowns and confusing opportunities. To the question that still does not seem to have a definitive answer, we must add another one that few are working on: what should change in the way of research, in the relationship between states, between states and the market in order to run faster and save ourselves. of this unbearable uncertainty?
The history of the most recent pandemics seems to herald times for which we are not prepared. The vaccine is not yet available – 17 years after the first case – for Sars, which is the disease most similar to Covid-19; Instead, forty years have passed without a definitive solution since the first case of HIV, which was, with 32 million deaths, the largest pandemic in contemporary history.
Meanwhile, just a few months ago, almost half a century after the first episode, the commercialization of the drug began, which definitively closes the periodic resurgence of Ebola, the deadliest virus. Living with Covid for years is simply inconceivable for a world as sophisticated and fragile as the one we lived in until the end of February.
Unless you mutate the virus. Or that we accept a mutation that technologies have been incubating for a long time.
According to a reconstruction by The Economist, the governments of the world have so far invested 10 billion dollars to finance the experimentation of 164 vaccines and reserve 4 billion doses. However, even an effort unprecedented in history appears, despite the passion and number of researchers who work tirelessly there, inadequate: both by the absolute size (10 billion are worth 670 times less than the wealth that the world already lost due to closures in the first part of the year); both, and above all, because the world seems to give, once again, a demonstration of a limited capacity to share knowledge, essential to not waste time “reinventing the wheel” and moving faster.
There are three issues that we carry with us from the pre-Covid world that slow down what increasingly resembles the “race to the moon” that – in the 1960s – decided who should have technological supremacy in a divided world. for the cold war.
The first is that the success rate of the trials is extremely low (less than one drug in twenty makes it through the four different stages of clinical verification, and only a couple of the six vaccines already in the third are expected to achieve agency approval.). Second, it is very likely that the process will get stuck even after finding the vaccine, simply because producing hundreds of millions of doses requires the aggregation of skills, technologies and rare raw materials that are scattered between countries that, precisely in these months, it seems that we are locked within our own borders: if the vaccine were really found by some of the countries that have the “will to power” (of which only the fragile European Union seems to be deprived), there would be possibilities of conflict that only a few movies had speculated.
The third problem is linked, however, to the conflict – never resolved and decisive – between the interests of large pharmaceutical companies and the public who run the risk of breaking down in the regulation of intellectual property: as the graph that accompanies the article relates , Covid of what happened with Ebola or HIV, affects more rich countries and this, theoretically, gives those who win the “race” a “gold” capable of altering the balance between countries and multinationals on which a order that’s no more.
The World Health Organization is trying to govern a complexity never seen before: the initiative (Anti Covid Tools Accelerator) announced in April, foresees a coordinated investment of 18 billion dollars to produce 2 billion doses of the vaccine for the purpose of 2021 (and this is the most optimistic of serious forecasts). But, unfortunately, the WHO is, today, the very symbol of the insufficiency of the institutions created to govern globalization after the Second World War and when, therefore, there were less than a thousand travelers a year who, for example, traveled . between Europe and China. Today, faced with a pandemic that is changing the world, a WHO remains alone and has a lower budget than that managed by the health system of the Abruzzo Region; and so influential that he could not even obtain data on comparable deaths and infections.
There are three problems and three are the impossible transformations that the struggle for survival will soon make inevitable. In the first place, we must have the courage to transfer the management (from border control to the production of vaccines) of obviously transnational emergencies (such as Covid) to the only operationally possible level, which is the international: the way is to proceed by aggregations. regional organizations converging into new global organizations and a decisive step is to complete Schengen with the competencies without which that agreement is a sieve.
On the other hand, with pharmaceutical companies, a method must be sought to separate the logic of wanting to make investment in research attractive from that of ownership of the knowledge itself that responds to a different interest. In a much faster world, patents end up creating unrealistic privileges (balance sheets for the last three years say that the largest pharmaceutical company, Pfizer, produces 160 billion in revenue of which it generates 50 billion in net profit, which is a figure (five times more than the world is investing in the vaccine) that end up damaging the very principles they were supposed to defend: the idea proposed by the Bill Gates Foundation itself is to replace them with prizes for those who produce knowledge.
Finally, we will have to modernize the very method by which the research is carried out using -more and better- the possibilities offered by the technologies that reduce the cost of access, processing and transmission of information: the Chinese are one step away from the application that will allow everyone, from the phone and at no cost, to verify the existence of the infection, completing a practically perfect monitoring system. If we found the conditions – safety and even ethical – to introduce sensors into the human body capable of detecting how different individuals respond to natural stimuli (as in the logic of the “Internet of beings” which is the third phase development of a network that connects not only computers and objects, but living beings), we could reduce the cost and time of developing the vaccine and begin to transform the rhetoric of “big data” into solutions capable of making us live better.
Heading into the future is a journey full of dangers, promises, political and cognitive obstacles: what we are experiencing is, however, a moment in which it will be a combination of humanity and ambition that will mark the difference between sad declines and new possibilities.
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