Slashdot Mirror
Canada Will Ship 800 Doses of Experimental Ebola Drug to WHO
The WSJ reports that 800 doses of an experimental vaccine for Ebola, developed over a decade at Public Health Agency of Canada’s main laboratory in Winnipeg, will be shipped to the World Health Organization in an effort to help fight the ongoing Ebola crisis in West Africa: The vaccine will be shipped by air from Winnipeg, Manitoba, to the University Hospital of Geneva via specialized courier. The vials will be sent in three separate shipments as a precautionary measure, due to the challenges in moving a vaccine that must kept at a very low temperature at all times. ... The vaccine had shown “very promising results in animal research” and earlier this week, Ottawa announced the start of clinical trials on humans at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in the U.S. ... The government has licensed NewLink Genetics Corp. , of the U.S., through its wholly owned subsidiary BioProtection Systems Corp. to further develop the vaccine for use in humans. The government owns the intellectual property rights associated with the vaccine.
Maybe my tax dollars might save some lives. And maybe we'll see the words 'government' and 'intellectual' in the same sentence more often. Here's hoping.
It's interesting that OP claims the government "owns" the "IP" related to the vaccine.
In the U.S. there are very few -- almost no -- circumstances in which the government can "own" rights to patents, inventions, copyrights, ect.
They can be classified, but not "owned" except under very rare circumstances. While the ideal has been distorted, especially since 2000, the Federal government is still an employee of The People in the States, and doesn't really "own" anything.
It's called favipiravir, and originates in Japan. It was tested on a few Spanish patients and it seems to have worked. The key difference between favipiravir and the ZMapp mAb is that favipiravir is effective even when given in the later stages of infection.