You'd think that with China's cavalier attitude towards intellectual property and trade secrets they would just copy one of the more effective mRNA vaccines and distribute it under the current Sinovax label.
There's probably a lot of know how in the form of trade secrets on top of patents. And in any case, merely copying what's in the patents does not help you as far as certifications are concerned, it's almost impossible to get the exact same end product, and who knows how that turns out once injected.
i do wonder how easy/hard it really is to reverse engineer a vaccine - and if it went wrong, some heads will roll. It's not like software piracy, where a perfect copy could be made.
I think the "code" of the vaccines is pretty much open. It is the production line, that is complicated and hard to set up, if you want to achieve some quality vaccines.