Vaccines are an essential part of our lives, especially with the number of diseases that are currently present and spreading among people. If we weren’t vaccinated against diseases like flu, rabies, measles, and similar
ones we would have suffered way more from those diseases. Thanks to vaccines our lives are safer.
Although vaccines are this important for our health, they are not easy nor cheap to produce. Scientists, doctors, and many more professions work on a vaccine for months or even years for a single disease. This makes making vaccines against new diseases take way too long. Also, the risk of side effects of a new vaccine makes the vaccines take longer to be completed. These all make vaccines take so much effort to produce.
Vaccines like many other products can be made marketable by patents. Patents are documents that protect your work from being stolen or being copied. Vaccines having patents and being able to be sold is debatable as everyone needs vaccines to live a healthier and safer life. Most countries already vaccinate against certain diseases for free but some governments can’t afford them. This makes vaccines having patents seem bad as the living right of people are not given to them.
Despite these negative sides of vaccines being patented, patents also have good sides. Many people work for a very long time to produce a single vaccine and they help humanity. What people usually don’t see is the number of resources and time it took them to produce the vaccine. The people who worked for this vaccine also need a reward for their hard work, they shouldn’t work for free. Money and success is great motivation for those who produce a new vaccine. Of course, I am not saying that they are just doing it for money and not for humanity’s sake but money and fame help them to become more motivated. The mass production of the vaccine also requires money for the resources, tools, and equipment that are required.
In conclusion, for the poorer countries and governments, vaccines costing money is a bad thing for them and for their people. But you have to take into consideration that people who develop vaccines use many resources and sacrifice a lot of time from their lives. If there wasn’t a reward for the people who developed the vaccine a major motivation source wouldn’t be available, so the development process would be longer.