Pfizer announced today that it has reached an agreement with a United Nations-backed group to allow other manufacturers to manufacture their covid-19 investigational drug and make it available in 95 countries.
The US pharmaceutical company said in a statement that it will license Unitaid’s United Nations-backed Medicines Patent Pool to allow generic companies to manufacture Pfizer-developed antivirals for use in 95 countries. covering about 53% of the world’s population.
According to Unitaid spokesman Herve Verhusen, the agreement covers all lower- and upper-middle-income countries in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as upper-middle-income countries that have achieved this status in the past five years.
Some countries have been excluded, such as Argentina, China, Malaysia and Thailand. Brazil, for example, may have access to a license to manufacture paxloid for export, but cannot manufacture it for domestic distribution.
However, health authorities believe that the fact that an agreement was reached even before the drug was approved will help bring an end to the pandemic more quickly.
“It is very important that we can provide access to a drug that appears to be effective and that has just been developed for more than four billion people,” said Esteban Burrone, Policy Officer at the Medicines Patent Pool.
According to him, drug manufacturers could start production of the drug within a few months, but the official acknowledged that the agreement may not suit everyone.
“We are trying to strike a delicate balance between the interests of (Pfizer), the sustainability that generic manufacturers demand, and above all the public health needs in the poorest countries,” says Esteban Burrone.
The terms of the agreement stipulate that Pfizer will not receive royalties for sales in poor countries and will waive royalties for sales from all countries covered by the agreement as long as the pandemic is a public health emergency.
Pfizer previously announced that its anti-covid-19 antiviral drug is effective in reducing hospitalizations or deaths by up to 90% among people with mild to moderate SARS-CoV-2 infection.
At the time, the drug manufacturer considered the preliminary results of the clinical trials so promising that it applied to the US Drug Enforcement Agency (FDA) for an emergency response.
Earlier this month, the UK granted conditional approval for another covid-19 antiviral pill, developed by pharmaceutical company Merck, that will be available to those over 18.
Back in October, a similar agreement was reached between Merck and the Medicines Patent Fund for other pharmaceutical companies to manufacture molnupiravir and make it available in 105 countries.
The price of the drug is not yet known, but according to a representative of Unitaid, in rich countries, for example, in “molnupirvir”, it will be about 600 euros.
Covid-19 has caused at least 5,098,386 deaths worldwide of the 253.17 million new coronavirus infections since the start of the pandemic, according to the latest report from France-Presse.
According to the General Directorate of Health, since March 2020, 18,265 people have died in Portugal and 1,108,462 cases of infection have been registered.
The disease is caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, discovered at the end of 2019 in Wuhan, a city in central China, and currently variants identified in several countries.
