Beyond vaccines, UNESCO seeks share more global science

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

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 scientific information is produced, shared, communicated,” said Ana Persic, chief of the science policy section at Paris-based UNESCO. “It is a paradigm shift for the scientific community.”