Covid-19 vaccines must have no patents: Muhammad Yunus

Nobel laureate and Bangladeshi social entrepreneur Muhammad Yunus has said that no one should own patents for Covid-19 vaccines.

“The coronavirus vaccine itself has divided the world into vaccine haves and vaccine have-nots,” he said.

Addressing the The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) Global Summit 2020 on Thursday, he said the vaccine must have no patents so that it can be manufactured anywhere in the world.

He asked the people to join the campaign to make Covid-19 vaccines free from any patent right belonging to everyone for common good.

Chinks in the armour

What has the pandemic done to the world? It exposes the faults and weakness in the economic systems of the world. It has, however, given an opportunity to build a better world, Yunus said.

He said the challenge was to rethink and redesign life.

“We can do this by putting man at the centre and working together and not look at the past but into the future,” he said.

“The disaster train on which we were in the pre-Covid world has stopped, we are off it, it is time to start a new train in a new direction,” he said.

“If a map is drawn on how people live across the world and where the work is. It will have the concentration of people living at the bottom, living on the edge of the economic scale. The density of the wealth is at the top,” he said.

“There is tremendous pressure, desperation and eagerness in people, businesses and governments to go back to the pre-Covid period because they don’t like the economy stalling. But, why go back? What is there to go back,” he asked.

“The disaster train has stopped. It is time to go into a new direction. It is time to build a world with no global warming, no wealth inequality,” he pointed out.

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