WHO will vote on proposal to guarantee COVID-19 vaccines are available, affordable for everyone

"There are currently no known vaccines for COVID-19 but fighting over those that might be produced has begun," VOA News reports. French drugmaker Sanofi was widely criticized Thursday after its CEO suggested to Bloomberg News that the U.S. would get first crack at its COVID-19 vaccine — one of about 100 under development worldwide — "because it's invested in taking the risk." French President Emmanuel Macron said a vaccine shouldn't be subject to market forces.

The World Health Organization's governing body, the World Health Assembly, is scheduled to vote next week on a resolution calling for "the universal, timely, and equitable access to and fair distribution of all quality, safe, efficacious, and affordable essential health technologies and products," Politico reports. That means, essentially, that any vaccine developed in the coming months would have no effective patent, allowing national governments to produce and distribute it without a license.

A group of 140 current and former leaders — including South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, and former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown — signed an open letter Wednesday pushing the World Health Assembly to "rally behind a people's vaccine against this disease." The world can't "leave this massive and moral task to market forces," the signatories write, and wealthy countries need to understand that "our world will only be safer once everyone can benefit from the science and access a vaccine" in "all countries, free of charge."

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Hedge funds and private equity firms, which bet on winners in the market, are already leery of putting their money into COVID-19 vaccines, despite a "huge" potential market, The Wall Street Journal reports. "By some measures, Chinese companies and a group at Oxford University are in the lead. Some companies say they will distribute a vaccine they develop at cost, potentially reducing profits for others."

"Pandemics can't be handled domestically because they are global in nature," Ryan Heath writes at Politico. "Delivering $8 trillion for domestic stimulus but only $8 billion for vaccine distribution is a defining failure for global solidarity."