Patrick Fallon/AFP via Getty Images
- Fauci said pharma firms can make billions of dollars while giving away drugs to developing nations.
- The pharma industry has lobbied against waiving intellectual property right on COVID-19 vaccines.
- Fauci said the US must help get the rest of the world vaccinated to stop the global pandemic.
- See more stories on Insider's business page.
Anthony Fauci said pharmaceutical companies can make billions of dollars even when smaller drug companies make generic version of their products.
Fauci, the chief medical advisor to President Joe Biden, said transferring the capability of making a COVID-19 vaccine to low- and middle-income countries is an important part of ending the global pandemic.
The Biden administration has supported waiving intellectual property rights for coronavirus vaccines produced by Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, and Moderna. The move allows drug companies in other countries to replicate the vaccine without infringing on trade laws.
Pharmaceutical companies lobbied against waiving patents, but former world leaders and the World Health Organization have called on the US to waive patents to get vaccines to people in non-wealthy nations quicker.
"I am very much in favor of protecting the capability of pharmaceutical companies to continue to make a good profit so they can continue to put what it takes to get newer drugs and newer interventions," Fauci said at the Bloomberg Businessweek conference on Thursday. "But there comes a time when the emergent nature of a situation requires doing things that would allow less well developed nations to have access to these interventions. And in this case, that intervention is vaccines for COVID-19."
Read more: The 24 billion-dollar startups to watch that are revolutionizing healthcare in 2021
Fauci said the way to prevent variants from mutating to become resistant to vaccines is to try to expand access to vaccines as much as possible.
"A very important tenet in virology is that viruses don't mutate if they don't replicate; if you prevent it from spreading from person to person and replicating, it's not going to mutate," he said. "So the easiest way to prevent the emergence of a problematic mutant, which would lead to a variant, is to get as many people throughout the world vaccinated as quickly as you possibly can."
The US has been a leader in getting HIV vaccines and AIDS treatment to developing nations in the past, Fauci noted. The immunologist pointed to George W. Bush's President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) program, which he said has saved 14 to 18 million lives in primarily Southern Africa since 2003.
Fauci added drug companies continued to make "billions and billions of dollars" at the same time other drug companies provided generic HIV treatments to people in developing nations.