The People Running This Should Stay Out of Small Planes

Researchers from the Texas Children’s Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine are offering a patent-free Covid vaccine to the world.

Even better, it uses a well known and widely used technique that will allow many countries to ramp up production quickly.

Needless to say, I expect the powers that be to fight this tooth and nail:

A new COVID-19 vaccine, developed by researchers from the Texas Children’s Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine, is being offered patent-free to vaccine manufacturers across the world. Human trials have shown the vaccine to be safe and effective, with India already authorizing its use as production ramps up to over 100 million doses per month.

The vaccine has been named Corbevax and it is based on a traditional protein-based technology that has been safely used for decades. Like other COVID-19 vaccines, Corbevax focuses on the coronavirus spike protein, but instead of using mRNA to direct our cells to produce those spike proteins internally it delivers lab-grown spike proteins to the body.

The researchers took the gene that codes for the spike protein and engineered yeast to produce it. These proteins are collected, purified, and combined with an adjuvant to enhance immune responses. This exact method has been used to produce the hepatitis B vaccine for years.

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In late 2020 the US research team developing the vaccine joined forces with India-based pharma company Biological E to begin clinical trials and establish manufacturing capacity. Across 2021 those clinical trials included several thousand participants and ultimately found Corbevax to be safe and effective at generating robust immune responses to SARS-CoV-2.

The trial data was compared to an already approved vaccine called Covishield (the Indian-made version of Astrazeneca’s well-known COVID-19 vaccine). Corbevax generated significantly fewer adverse effects than Covishield and produced superior immune responses.

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Perhaps the most important feature of this new vaccine is the fact it has been developed as a patent-free product that can be easily manufactured by vaccine-producers around the world. Peter Hotez, one of the researchers leading the project, has described it as a “gift to the world,” pointing out the technology has already been transferred to vaccine producers in India, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Botswana. 

If Corbevax enters testing in the United States, I want to volunteer as a test subject.

It's not that I think that the technology is exciting, it's really kind of dull and old school, but putting out a competing vaccine which is unencumbered by IP bullsh%$ is a tremendous public good.