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.

Comments

Tax dollars at work.

[canatech]

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.

Re:Tax dollars at work.

[Anonymous Coward]

"In the U.S. there are very few -- almost no -- circumstances in which the government can "own" rights to patents, inventions, copyrights, ect."

In Canada and most other democracies the gov't is the people, and the people are allowed to own stuff. In the US the government is imposed on a hapless population by lizard beings from planet Big Business, who milk the american people for every ounce of their creativity, via rhetoric and constitutional spells and other sacralized bullshit, in order to benefit Big Business. Duh?