Patents are not the main roadblock to producing enough coronavirus vaccines for the world – rather the challenge is technology transfer with manufacturers, said a top official at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) on Wednesday.

His comments joined those of pharma advocates in what seems to be a growing counter-trend to that of civil society advocates who say that IP monopolies are blocking the rapid scale-up of manufacturing.

Speaking at an event sponsored by the Geneva Graduate Institute’s Global Health Center, Chris Elyas also said that the Foundation is presently working on a number of new tech transfer agreements, to expand vaccine manufacturing in low- and middle-income countries – which have not yet been made public.

“I don’t want to say patents are never the problem, but I think the bigger problem in vaccines is how do we get as many of these tech transfers so that we can get high quality, low cost vaccine at scale as soon as possible,” said Elyas, President of the Foundation’s Global Development Division.

[huge_it_slider id=”15″]“As we’ve been working with the vaccine companies, now, the challenge seems to be more about the tech transfer, the rapid scale-up, the capacity for producing vaccines,” he said at the webinar on “Public and private responsibilities in COVID-19”.

“We are actually supporting a range of different tech transfer efforts,” said Elyas. “We are working on other tech transfer agreements that are just not ready to be announced yet.”

The Foundation played a role in helping mediate the successful licensing deal for the AstraZeneca vaccine with one of the world’s vaccine manufacturing powerhouses – India’s Serum Institute – which has enabled hundreds of millions of doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine to be produced for the world.