Those were voluntary licences.
The starting point was that companies made the decision that they wanted to give the drugs away to get them to the people who needed them quickly. Those are what we call access programs. Some of them were supported by the Clinton Foundation and PEPFAR, if you're familiar with that.
After people got to a certain point with that, then came the licensing. As I said before, the licensing started not with the state-of-the-art drugs but with, let's just say, the drug of the last generation or the two generations before. It was still effective, but it might not have been what was coming on the market. You basically had to train people. You had to bring them from around the world. Then you had to get to some comfort level with the Indian and South African companies that there wasn't going to be leakage because they were exporting back into the developed world. You didn't want the AIDS drugs that were being made in India showing up in a pharmacy in Amsterdam or San Francisco because the companies were still trying to recoup their costs.
That's one of those issues that we have to confront that makes the world slightly different and a little bit awkward in the conversations that are going on now in Geneva and ones that we're familiar with in Canada. When we created our generic industry in Canada, we also created a very powerful company that got to a point where we were paying more for generic drugs in Canada than other countries were paying for generic drugs. We were paying less for the branded drug, but we were paying more for the generic drugs.
Similarly, in the case of South Africa and India, we created Aspen in South Africa, and various other people in India kind of have monopolies when you look at it. When anyone goes to produce something in India, they go to Serum largely, and they go to Aspen in South Africa. You have to ask yourself what you really achieve when you move it off of the branded or innovation company that came up with it and turn it over to a local monopoly in another country. That's something that we didn't necessarily have to think through 20 years ago. The concern with intellectual property is that you're trying to make sure that you don't get leakage and that you're not taking the state-of-the-art form with you, because, honestly, you have to put people in place around the world to show people. It's not just the patents; it's the know-how. It's all that comes with putting these things together.
I heard the last speaker from the Trade Justice Network talk, and I have tremendous sympathy for that, but it's not even close to what we're talking about here. To take these mRNA vaccines that weren't even in existence 12 months ago and share them around the world.... We can't even get the inputs. We're having blocks on the inputs we need to get the stuff made in India and Europe. Now we're going to set up other places for those inputs to go in India and South Africa.
It sounds good; it doesn't work.