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“President Joe Biden on Wednesday threw his support behind waiving intellectual property rights for COVID-19 vaccines.” Reuters
The right is critical of waiving IP rights, arguing that it would harm innovation without meaningfully increasing vaccine access.
“Expanding access to the vaccines beyond traditional licensing agreements will only create a host of safety concerns. Licensing agreements allow companies such as Merck to make sure their partners have the technology necessary to develop complex drugs safely and competently. The coronavirus vaccines, in particular, require hard-to-find raw materials and updated production facilities that can scale the materials effectively, according to industry experts…
“Waving patent protections for these vaccines will allow manufacturers that might not have the required equipment and competence to develop these vaccines anyway. This could result in counterfeits, ineffective batches, and other safety hazards.”
Kaylee McGhee White, Washington Examiner
“These new vaccines, which regulators consider to be ‘biological drugs,’ or ‘biologics,’ complex formulations often derived from living cells, are so complicated to make that the ‘same’ product from a new manufacturer, and sometimes even from a new facility of an established manufacturer, is considered by regulators to be a new drug, a ‘biosimilar’ that needs comprehensive testing before it can be sold. This is not like transferring the recipe for your grandma’s Irish stew, or even the rights to make a small-molecule drug…
“Not only is this vaccine patent waiver initiative counterproductive and futile, but it is also a sign that policymakers place virtue signaling above the longer-term interests of the United States.”
Andrew I. Fillat and Henry Miller, Washington Examiner
“[India and South Africa] claim that waiving IP protections for Covid vaccines and therapies is necessary to expand global access, but their motivation is patently self-interested. Both are large producers of generic drugs, though they have less expertise and capacity to make complex biologics like mRNA vaccines. They want to force Western pharmaceutical companies to hand over IP free of charge so they can produce and export vaccines and therapies for profit…
“Moderna has been working on mRNA vaccines for a decade. Covid represents its first success. Ditto for Novavax, which has been at it for three decades… Waiving IP protections for Covid vaccines and medicines will give away America’s crown pharmaceutical jewels and make the U.S. and world more reliant on India and China for pharmaceuticals…
“Instead of handing over American IP to the world, Mr. Biden could negotiate bilateral vaccine agreements and export excess U.S. supply. If Mr. Biden wants to increase global supply safely, the U.S. could spend more to help the companies produce more for export. Then the jobs would go to Americans.”
Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal
“There will never again be another Operation Warp Speed if this plan goes through. The American companies in question responded to requests from the Trump administration and basically dropped everything else they were doing to burn the midnight oil and come up with viable vaccines, two of them with staggeringly high efficacy rates, and do so in an unimaginably short period of time. They received significant financial help from the government to do it, it’s true, but that was an agreement that our Congress made. Pfizer and Moderna, along with the others, put in this work with the understanding that they would be able to profit from their labors on the back end.”
Jazz Shaw, Hot Air
The left is generally supportive of waiving IP rights, and calls for additional measures to ensure global vaccine access.
The left is generally supportive of waiving IP rights, and calls for additional measures to ensure global vaccine access.
“Federally funded basic and applied research at the National Institutes of Health, the Defense Department and academic labs created the foundation for the mRNA technology used in the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. In fact, almost no drugs reach market in the U.S. without such funding. Federal funding of the Moderna effort has been even more generous: The company collaborated directly with the NIH in developing its vaccine and received federal grants totaling nearly $1 billion during the development and trial stage…
“Government scientists, moreover, are listed as inventors on some patent applications filed by Moderna… Moderna on Thursday reported its first-ever quarterly profit, of $1.2 billion… Pfizer said its COVID vaccine had contributed $3.5 billion to its quarterly revenue of $14.6 billion… The best thing that may come out of the patent waiver debate could be a fresh look at how pharmaceutical research and development is funded, and how its benefits should be distributed.”
Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times
“One of the objections to patent waivers, [Georgetown University professor Dr. Matthew] Kavanagh said, has been that ‘there’s no unused production capacity in the world to make mRNA vaccines, and that is entirely true. But a year ago, no company in the world had made an mRNA vaccine at scale. We are going to have to see a real investment of money and effort into saying let’s build new productive capacity.’…
“Moderna and Pfizer stock fell in response to Wednesday’s news. But they could still make money on technology transfer agreements.”
Melody Schreiber, New Republic
“A new private facility in Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, will produce hundreds of millions of doses of a vaccine developed by China’s state-owned Sinopharm Group. In Brazil, the Instituto Butantan, a state-funded biologics-research center, is producing CoronaVac in cooperation with a private Chinese company, Sinovac. And in India, the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) contracted with six pharmaceutical manufacturers to produce the Sputnik V vaccine, which is similar to the J&J vaccine…
“We spoke with Hemanth Nandigala, the managing director of one of those manufacturers, Virchow Biotech… He began talks with the RDIF in December and expects to roll out 50 million Sputnik V doses a month by July… This assertion that manufacturers aren’t able to begin making these recipes is simply not true.”
Chelsea Clinton and Achal Prabhala, The Atlantic
Others note, “Experts I spoke with emphasized that, generally speaking, the world’s entire supply of critical raw materials is already going into vaccines, and there are no factories ‘sitting idle’ waiting for permission to start making them. What’s more, changing a factory’s processes to produce a new kind of vaccine is a difficult, error-prone process — which went wrong, for example, when a plant converted to make Johnson & Johnson vaccines spoiled millions of doses…
“The Biden administration’s decision is a positive development, but debates over intellectual property can also distract the world from the policy measures that could really end the pandemic: building our vaccine-manufacturing capacity, committing to purchase the doses the rest of the world needs, and working directly with manufacturers to remove every obstacle in their path… IP waivers are much less important than just directly funding poor countries’ access to the vaccine.”
Kelsey Piper, Vox
A libertarian's take
“Suspending patents is not a moral imperative, it's moral grandstanding and would do nothing to get the vaccines faster to the people who need them. The World Health Organization lists fewer than 25 countries capable of manufacturing any vaccines whatsoever, much less the novel and highly complex COVID-19 vaccines…
“If all goes well, the vaccine makers are on track to supply enough COVID-19 vaccine to inoculate 7 billion people by the end of this year. It would be much more helpful for progressives to put aside their vendetta against the pharmaceutical companies and instead concentrate on figuring out the logistics of getting vaccines to people in poor countries.”
Ronald Bailey, Reason
79-year-old diver and this fish have been BFFs for nearly 30 years.
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