The EU has proposed "we'll try a little harder" as a substitute for unlocking vaccine production.

The point at the end about the existing WTO for compulsory licensing of patents is true (though countries including the US have pressured countries not to do this), but it is fundamentally inadequate because it only allows a country to make vaccine for its own use. Most countries, other than big economies, can't do their own vaccine manufacturing. The bigger and more capable countries must be allowed to make vaccine for the smaller/poorer countries.

Globally, the world has to choose between efficiency (and profit), and finishing the job of vaccinating everyone quickly. The efficient way to vaccinate everyone is to make just enough vaccine plants, then run them until they make enough vaccine for everyone. That costs less but will take a long time. The rapid way is to keep building vaccine plants, so that the production will accelerate. This way, we will get enough vaccine to vaccinate everyone, sooner.

The drawback is that many of those vaccine plants won't run for a whole year. The expense of running them may seem wasteful. Private companies would call it wasteful, but so would the governments that have to pay to get them running. "Why be in such a rush", they will argue. "We have enough plants now — be patient and you'll all get vaccine."

However, while billions of people are "being patient", tens or hundreds of millions of them will be patients, and millions of them might die from Covid-19.

In addition, the virus might mutate and become even more dangerous than the Delta and Kappa variants are now. They might kill hundreds of millions of people.

Producing vaccine as fast as we can until the job is finished is worth the cost.