We're talking about the AstraZeneca vaccine, but it's important to mention that it was the Oxford University vaccine, which was transferred to AstraZeneca under certain specific conditions set out in the licensing contract. These conditions made AstraZeneca the only company for which some technology transfer had been requested, which did happen. It had also agreed to sell its vaccine at cost for as long as the pandemic lasted. The first time I saw a press release saying that the COVID‑19 pandemic was over, and described as only endemic, was in an AstraZeneca press release. It was very quick to say that the pandemic over, which was rather peculiar.
It's important to understand that for patents, it's not a single company that creates a technology. There are networks of corporations working on the same things. How the patent network is organized is therefore important.
The University of British Columbia's technology became the property of the Canadian firm Genevant, which owns many of the patents Technical difficulty presented with someone from Providence Therapeutics…