PARIS – While the U.S. president is calling for suspending patents on COVID-19 vaccines, experts at UNESCO are quietly working on a more ambitious plan: a new global system for sharing scientific knowledge that would outlast the current pandemic.
At a meeting wrapping up Tuesday, diplomats and legal and technical experts from UNESCO'S member states are trying to draw up new global guidelines under a project called Open Science.
UNESCO’s specialists say the pandemic has shown that sharing sensitive research is possible: Chinese scientists sequenced and shared the genome of the then-new coronavirus in January 2020, allowing German researchers to then quickly devise a screening test shared around the world. “The crisis put a spotlight on how