Interviewer: There is been some speculation that the changing intellectual property rules and allowing these vaccines, as you say the recipe for these vaccines to be shared would be helpful. Do you think that would be helpful?
Bill Gates: No. There is only so many vaccine factories in the world. People are very serious about the safety of vaccines. Moving something that had never been done, moving a factory from say a J&J factory into a factory in India, that is novel. It's only because of our grants and expertise that can happen at all. The thing that is holding this back in this case is not intellectual property. Its not like some idle vaccine factory with regulatory approval that makes magically safe vaccines. You know you got to do the trials on these things, and every manufacturing process has to be looked at in a very careful way. There is all sorts of issues around intellectual property having to do with medicines, but not in terms of how quickly we have been able to ramp up the volume here. I remember how soft people were when we said we were going to do second sources in these developing country factories, you know that was a novel thing. We got all the rights from the vaccine companies. They didn't hold it back. They were participating. I do a regular phone call with the pharmaceutical CEOs to make sure that work is going at full speed.
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