I really don't understand the big push for patent waivers. It's not the rate limiting step, tech transfer is. The big 4 companies that are currently scaling up production of their Western approved vaccines are having trouble even doing internal scaling and transfer to new mfg facilities; doing so to an external entity with different institutional knowledge and quality systems is several times more challenging.
Some of the vaccines coming down the pipeline are made in more traditional (albeit slower) ways and may be more amenable to rapid transfer. JNJ and AZN currently are close enough to existing technologies that they could be transferred or licensed without too much trouble to another major and experienced industry partner - things that indeed have happened with e.g. Serum Institute of India (we've also seen lending/pooling of mfg resources from other industry players even without explicit licensing). But even with 'easy' JNJ and AZN technologies, going to a newbie is a recipe for wasted effort and huge yield/quality issues.
But the mRNA vaccines? No way in hell that anyone is going to be able to easily transfer this technology or replicate the technology without help. It's new and incredibly hard. Hell, Moderna said last year that they weren't going to enforce their patents on the vaccine but no one has been lining up to make it because without a huge amount of help from Moderna you're not going to be able to replicate it.
This is not like a traditional small molecule drug with a single API of known structure you need to replicate and throw in some excipients. This is essentially a complex biologic and delivery system that would take years and many billions of dollars of investment to replicate without active involvement of the inventors. And compelling tech transfer is likely a much tougher sell than waiving patent restrictions. Honestly, the main reason Pfizer partnered with BioNTech probably had less to do with trying to make money off the vaccine itself (though it hasn't been bad for their bottom line or their public image) but because it allowed them to 'freely' get access to very sophisticated mRNA delivery systems that are going to be the basis for an entire class of drugs (not just vaccines) in the coming years. Moderna and Pfizer aren't just going to give away that kind of specialized tribal knowledge, and patents aren't very useful for replicating that kind of knowledge.
For a non-drug but relevant example: my own company is making an entirely new class of materials. We have IP, sure, and we aggressively pursue a strong IP portfolio to try to minimize the proliferation of 'me too' products. But our biggest protections are our trade secrets - if I was handed the final product along with every scrap of publicly available information about my company's technology, I am not sure that I would be able to replicate it in any reasonable time frame.
It makes sense to focus on things that will help in concrete ways: improving supply chains for raw materials, working on partnerships to pool mfg resources and/or licensure, encouraging tech transfer when appropriate. Waiving patents doesn't really help all that much and just sets up a contentious and adversarial relationship when you absolutely need these companies to play ball in scaling global mfg of these vaccines.