As the coronavirus continues its creep into communities around the world, while raging through others in India and Brazil, the global push to head off the virus very clearly depends on our collective ability to get as many people vaccinated as quickly as possible. In the U.S., the benefits of mass and rapid vaccination are plain to see, but much of the rest of the world is still mired in lockdowns and grappling with swamped emergency rooms. To boost the rate of global vaccination there is growing momentum behind the idea of temporarily waiving patent rights for the drugmakers that developed the vaccines, a call that the Biden administration came out in support of Wednesday. U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai said the U.S. would move forward with international negotiations on how such a waiver might look and work.
The White House’s support is a shocking development given the country’s history as grand protector of private enterprise at all costs and provides a huge boost to the campaign to waive patent rights as a means of supercharging global vaccination. The proposed World Trade Organization waiver of intellectual property protections for the vaccines was first proposed by India and South Africa last fall and summarily rejected by the U.S. and Europe, still grasping to come up with shots of their own. The waiver would, in effect, allow anyone around the world to start producing vaccines on their own rather than waiting and waiting for the supply chain of the global economy and geopolitics to link them in. For much of the developing world, that wait will surely take many months and even years.
The U.S., as home to a wide array of companies, from tech to pharma and beyond, is obviously a strong supporter of intellectual property protections. When it comes to the coronavirus, COVID-19 vaccine makers Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson are all American companies. So it’s hard to overstate the significance of the American government getting behind the idea of temporarily waiving patents as a seismic first step in it actually happening. The World Health Organization has come out in support of the idea that has been signed onto by 60 other nations. Th E.U. and U.K. have not pledged similar support, though Europe has indicated a willingness to entertain the notion that will require significant negotiation to get the unanimous agreement required to alter the WTO’s intellectual property rules.
Opponents of the patent-waiving idea cite a number of reasons that it’s bad policy with myriad unintended consequences and, perhaps most importantly, that it won’t actually get safe, effective vaccines into the arms of underserved people any faster. Some of the complaints, from the pharmaceutical industry and some Republicans (formerly the champions of free trade before Trump), are tried and true, straight out of the big pharma playbook: It will stifle innovation, disincentivize private companies from taking great risks and making big investments in life-saving drugs in the future. Others are more technical, notably, that it won’t actually help to just hand over the recipe, because building production capacity is unbelievably complex and ramping it up could itself take years. Another complaint is that a surge in producers of variable quality worldwide will make it harder to get the components to make the drugs. Such a scenario, the thinking goes, could set off a global race that could make it more difficult for established producers to make drugs for a marketplace that will likely see an increase in substandard vaccines, even counterfeit ones.
“Who will make the vaccine next time?” Brent Saunders, the former chief executive of the pharmaceutical company Allergan wondered aloud on Twitter in response to the news of U.S. support for the waiver. When it comes to the economics of vaccination, given that the leading COVID vaccine manufacturers are set to do tens of billions of dollars in sales this year alone, generating billions in revenue, it’s not like the economic incentive for making the vaccines wasn’t realized. And the R&D risk taking, so often cited by drugmakers, doesn’t exactly apply here, as the U.S. government pre-paid for many of the companies’ initial doses, giving them the opportunity to take a moonshot without the severe financial disincentive of failing to make a successful shot. Most American drugmakers rely heavily on publicly funded resources anyway, like labs at public universities, taking taxpayer-fueled innovations the final mile before selling them back to the public in pill form at a huge markup. The argument here is complicated by the fact that Pfizer and Moderna’s vaccines use novel technologies in the form of messenger RNA platforms, which they hope to use to create a wide range of vaccines and other drugs in the future.
There is clearly a moral imperative to getting more people vaccinated as fast as humanly possible, because it will save countless lives—and restore livelihoods. It is also in the U.S.’s national interest to get the world vaccinated, as the longer the virus lingers in the human population, the more opportunity there is for variants to emerge, one of which might be worse than the first, sending the U.S. and the world back into isolation—or worse. Viewed cynically, these variants, which will likely require booster shots, thus new tweaked vaccines, could provide a revenue stream for drug companies for years. So the free market incentive, if that’s what pharmaceutical companies want to appeal to, perversely isn’t actually to snuff out the virus.
Will waiving patent rights actually help? Maybe, but it’s complicated, and all involved seem to agree it’s only a first step in a wider solution. “[A]ctivists said a waiver alone would not increase the world’s vaccine supply,” the New York Times reports. “It must be accompanied by a process known as ‘tech transfer,’ in which patent holders supply technical know-how and personnel. Activists are also demanding that Mr. Biden use his leverage to ensure that manufacturing is scaled up around the globe, and not just by the pharmaceutical companies that now hold the patents.”
“Vaccines often have far fewer patents than drugs—but they are trickier to manufacture, so it is the availability of expertise that is holding back production,” Robin Jacob, chair of intellectual property law at University College London, told the Financial Times. Johnson & Johnson, for example, said it has had difficulty finding production partners, and after considering 100 potential partners, concluded only 10 had the capability to produce the its shot.
Whether or not the waiver actually comes to fruition, in the near-term, the economic threat of releasing the formulas into the wild has generated new incentives for drug companies to find ways to get their vaccines to parts of the world that were not previously prioritized by the global economy. Now that the U.S. has all the vaccines it could ever need, there’s no excuse not to do more to help people in need elsewhere. Finding the best way to do that will require collaboration and negotiation. But let’s not get distracted by drug companies fretting about government ruining their incentive to save the day the next time a pandemic rolls around. The house is on fire now, use every ounce of water available to put it out.
