COVID vaccine makers must relent on intellectual property rights and see to the worldâs needs Updated May 1, 2021, 2:30 a.m. Email to a Friend This is the peopleâs vaccine â share it widely ⪠Taxpayer dollars assumed the financial risk for enabling rapid production of any successful vaccine candidates. ⪠Taxpayer dollars are funding the COVAX program; however, high income-countries have pre-ordered most of the actual vaccines. Rosenblatt writes that âthe system that gave us these shots depends entirely on strong intellectual property rights. These same protections will be critical when we face the next pandemic.â With the next pandemic, the world will be far safer when vaccines can be produced everywhere because the infrastructure will have been created. One of the lessons from the HIV and Ebola pandemics is that systems created then have enabled the Global South to quickly and effectively tamp down this pandemic.