By Michael Erman

(Reuters) – Pfizer Inc (NYSE 🙂 announced on Wednesday that it will offer all of its trademarked medicines such as Paxlovid COVID-19 treatment and Ibrance, a breast cancer drug with a huge sales record to 45 countries at a non-profit cost.

They are not able to access innovative treatment options. It can take four to seven years longer for new treatments to become available in low-income countries, according to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, if they become available at all.

Pfizer announced that the plan included 23 wholly-owned and patentable medicines and vaccines for infectious diseases. Paxlovid as well Ibrance are included in the plan. Also, Prevnar 13 is added to the list. Xeljanz is a rheumatoid arthritis drug. Xalkori or Inlyta are cancer treatments.

Comirnaty’s COVID-19 vaccine, which he developed in collaboration with BioNTech SE (NASDAQ :), was included on the same list.

Albert Bourla, chief executive of the company stated that all medicines should be accessible to patients.

“But, clearly, the antiviral Paxlovid is going to a huge deal for them — if they have it urgently they can get,” he stated.

It said that new drugs and vaccines will be added to the Pfizer drug portfolio when they are launched at a non-profit price.

Pfizer’s “An Accord for a Healthier World”, which includes 18 low-income and 27 high-income nations, covers most of Africa as well as much of Southeast Asia. Five African countries have pledged to join the accord, announced by the World Economic Forum at Davos.

Lazarus Chakwera President of Malawi said that an agreement would allow them to share “the burden and task of production and delivery of supplies, which will save millions of people’s lives.”

Pfizer was criticized over how it launched its COVID-19 vaccine. Some poor countries waited for several months while the wealthier ones arrived.

Bourla explained that the difficulty of this rollout and the lack of infrastructure that allowed for distribution of vaccines in certain countries have influenced the design of the new accord.

Bourla explained that instead of saying “I handed you the product,” he said, “We are not going to wash our hands, but we are saying: “We’ll give the products, we will talk with you, see how we can organize a system which can use them.”