Member of the High-Level Expert Group of the National Health Commission, chief epidemiologist and doctoral supervisor of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, member of the WHO Scientific Committee on Infectious Disease Surveillance and Emergency Response, and China Field Epidemiology Training Project Executive Director, Professor Zeng Guang mentioned in his 2021 opening speech that human society’s fight against the new coronavirus can be divided into three stages.

The first stage is the prevention and control stage before large-scale use of the vaccine. The fight against the virus relies entirely on the prevention and control of the national system. It uses state machinery and needs to mobilize all people to participate.

The second phase is from mass vaccination to the initial establishment of human immune barriers. This phase is characterized by the mass vaccination phase, which we are currently in.

The third stage is the normal prevention and control stage after the human immune barrier is established. This phase also relies on mass vaccination.

It can be seen that it is very necessary to get vaccinated against the new coronavirus.

However, judging from the number of vaccinations of various vaccines in the world, countries without vaccine development and production capabilities have significantly lower vaccination rates than those countries that can develop and produce vaccines. Many developing countries rely on donations from other countries and may not be able to buy them.

In view of this situation, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus suggested that relevant countries give up the intellectual property rights of the new crown vaccine, and even publish relevant technical documents, so that all countries can mass-produce the new crown vaccine and increase vaccine production. .

Because if the COVID-19 vaccine cannot be distributed equitably, it will be difficult to defeat COVID-19 in a short time, and the world will not be able to recover quickly. If we want to vaccinate all people, we must first increase production, but vaccines also have costs, and many countries simply cannot afford them.

Tedros's suggestion is of course from the perspective of the United Nations, which wants to end the worldwide epidemic as soon as possible, but this method is not necessarily appropriate. We must know that the development and production of vaccines cost a lot of money. Once intellectual property rights are given up, many pharmaceutical companies will lose a lot of profits. In the long run, it will not be conducive to the development of health services.