When medical authorities last year celebrated test results confirming the success of a new Ebola vaccine, the doctors who work on the front lines of the world’s poorest countries warned that the arrangement behind the vaccine’s development must never happen again.
In 2010, the Public Health Agency of Canada granted a small, Iowa-based pharmaceutical company called NewLink Genetics an exclusive patent to develop a vaccine against Ebola, the deadly, highly contagious fever that first erupted in central Africa in 1976.
Government health agencies here and elsewhere will grant a single corporation an exclusive patent to prevent or cure a disease that otherwise might go ignored. T
