Covid: US backs waiver on vaccine intellectual property

Something here smells deeply hypocritical.

Currently vaccine companies such as the German Curevac (which is the vaccine company Trump famously tried to buy) is being held back by lack of core ingredients which are under American export bans.

The US still upholds the export bans setup by the Trump administration. Biden can just revoke those. Yet he promotes the idea of waivering vaccine patents knowing well how hard that would be to do in practice.

And exactly how is it supposed to work? Will Pfizer no longer have to pay license fees to BioNTech?

Moderna already waved their rights last year [0]. But the production of such vaccines is not easy and I believe that an organization grows and learns as a whole as a solution so complex is developed. Consequently it is not easy to replicate what they do. I think at best this puts a cap on the vaccine's price since "in theory" given enough financial incentive the vaccine can be reproduced. That's my theory, feel free to prove me wrong.

Imho: If this becomes real, don't expect big benefits. I appreciate what Moderna did but forcing other companies to do the same may be overkill for little benefit and I wonder what the long term effect is on companies' willingness to focus on a vaccine for the next pandemic. Perhaps companies realize that waiving IP rights is good PR, or they can do it for parts of the process that is easier to scale or outsource to 3rd parties.

What happens to startups that do find an easy to copy vaccine production process and they know their IP will be taken from them? I honestly don't know but I feel that they should be fairly compensated... But what's fair. IP is just so difficult. I wonder what a world without it would look like. More company secrets, that's for sure.

[0] https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-d...

Indian pharmacies already disregard medication patents without anybody's permission.

Vaccine manufacturing is just a way more involved process than anything what an average organic synthesis shop can handle. Dealing with antibodies, proteins, plasmids, or RNA requires real factories rather than garage labs.

What one need is a complete process transfer: instructions on setting up every process, along with supplies needed, and operation training, and supervision.

Are patents really the barrier here? Are there factories out there, in countries that aren't currently producing vaccine, and are unable to purchase it? I seriously doubt it. Making these vaccines is not trivial. The facilities required can't be whipped up overnight. The skilled staff can't be pulled out of thin air.

Most countries capable of producing vaccines like this are already doing so, as fast as possible, and exporting them to the rest of the world at an incredible rate. Sure, more and faster would be better. Sure, countries are prioritizing their own citizens. But giving away all the IP is not going to change much at all.

By the time the few other countries who are even capable of manufacturing vaccines are able to bring production online, there's likely to already be a glut of extra doses on the market. The US has vaccinated nearly half of adults. Most of those remaining are voluntarily avoiding it. Vaccine shortage isn't a problem in the US at this point. US manufacturers are still increasing output, and soon there will be tens of millions of doses being exported every month, far more than any currently-nonexistent manufacturing facility could hope to produce within the next year.

Two of the worst-off countries that could most-benefit from more vaccine are India and Brazil. India has the means, doesn't really care about IP much in the first place, and already has facilities licensed to produce, but completely failed to plan. They can solve this problem if they get their shit together; the IP isn't a barrier whatsoever. Brazil has an even bigger failure of leadership and failure of public will, and already isn't taking advantage of vaccine that they have, so again, IP isn't the problem.

The simple truth is that anyone who can make these vaccines already is. Look what happened at the Emergent plant in Maryland when they tried to make the J&J vaccine. Even in the US, with good existing facilities and--at least on paper--qualified staff, production was a failure, and many months later, it still isn't producing any vaccine.

My cynical take after having worked close to the industry:

- this was not done without some level of agreement (probably not enthusiastic agreement)from the companies affected

- other companies can use the IP, if they can make it work (major challenge with the mRNA vaccines)

- for the mRNA vaccines this will have little to no impact; other companies can use the IP but it will take a year or more before they can start producing vaccines, and by then we’ll be onto v2.0

- the IP holders will enter into licensing agreements before any IP is broken (in exchange for technical help). Companies won’t miss out on much revenue since these werent priority markets anyways

Basically the manufacturers will keep the wealthy western markets to themselves where all the profit is while gaining PR by opening up more access for developing countries

How would a "waiver" work? Last I understood about law, a country can't take away the rights of companies (or people) without their consent or modifying the patent laws.

Or is this a matter where because it has to do with overseas patent protection, the US could decline to enforce certain agreements?

And don't companies have patent protection in every country they seek to do business anyway?

This seems like a performative move that does nothing at best, and destroys the credibility of mRNA vaccines at worst.

The manufacture of these vaccines is not simple. It is not simply a matter of the US “waiving” a patent. However if other countries decide to participate in this performance, they may end up just manufacturing a vaccine which doesn’t work.

The virus is killing thousands per day. Do you really think a major country like India isn’t manufacturing the cure simply because of a patent?

China blatantly, openly, and proudly flaunts patents as a core part of their manufacturing economy. Why aren’t they manufacturing the mRNA vaccines, giving it away to countries that want it, and looking like the good guy here?

Because waiving the patent does nothing but generate positive press. It’s a fugazi.

My initial, knee-jerk view was that the government is stealing private property. Bad, bad government screwing with the free market!

But here we are talking about Intellectual Property and patents. Which themselves are a government-granted monopoly...

Truth is patents are mostly used to stifle innovation while their original purpose was to encourage it. A company inventing something novel will have a pretty nice advantage over the competition even without the government's help. That's not even taking into consideration that besides patents there are other tons of difficulties when copying a product. Manufacturing alone is pretty huge. Then marketing: the original vs the cheap knock-offs.

When in doubt, I think it's better to err on the side of the free market and of non-intervention. But, to come full circle, in this case the government encouraged companies to publish their research with the promise to protect it. So my only conclusion is, again, to never trust the government.

/rant

The problem is not just the intellectual property right now, it is also all the supply chain for its components plus the training and equipment. I can give you the recipe for a truffle egg omelet... Now you need the truffles, the eggs and a way to cook it. In the long term however I hope we are going to start rethinking durg pricing and intellectual property. They had people convinced that making a drug is expensive and they need that to pay for R&D, now that we know it is not what is happening, we can move on.

How is this supposed to work really? The President is not above the law (as Justice Kagan famously put it 2 years ago). He can't just suspend the patent law. He can ask the Congress to revoke the law, but that would be going forward, it would not act retroactively (as per the Article 1 of the Constitution). Let's just say the President issues some type of Executive Order to overrule the patent protections for the Covid vaccines. Would the companies not sue? Would they not go all the way to the Supreme Court? Would all the courts agree with the President that he can just make the law go poof when he feels there is a moral obligation to do so?

This kind of lip-service to global equality and fairness is very typical of United States in general. The difference being that DJT was very vocal whereas during tenures of established politicians the packaging around these intentions is much much better. Problem with Trump was that he was crass. Biden isnt. So if people are wondering why would you support this waiver while withholding export bans is that pledging support to something that isn't possible is a much easier way to earn brownie points than comitting to something actionable.

The biggest hurdle to getting more vaccine manufacturing capacity online is probably the hysteria around "China might steal our vaccine technology!!!!". There is no other country with the experience of rapidly scaling up manufacturing supply chains. But in the case of these vaccines, especially the mRNA ones, very hard to do without exact specifications of the microfluidics and process parameters needed.

How does patent waiving work? It makes the patent invalid? Is it for a specific amount of time or do vaccines become CC0? What will happen when other countries start selling the vaccines (new covid vaccines will be the norm every year)? What about vaccine supplies ?

Considering that the inventors are Biontech, oxford/AZ and Moderna (who won't enforce their patent), it seems like an easy decision for the US to make.

Pandemic has shown that mRNA vaccination manufacturing is a question of national security. I do not think those patents will be enforceable, if another pandemic starts, and countries decide to make their own vaccines. And countries like India, China, Thailand or Russia have pretty advanced biotech manufacturing and research.

These companies quite literally saved the world as we know it.

If I was the CEO or the President of those companies I'd close shop and go start a cryptocurrency instead

You are sending the message that if the problem is too important, then you should not work on it because as soon as you find a solution you'd be held at gunpoint to make it availible for free.

There will be a huge slowdown in Selfdriving cars tech as well. If Waymo or Amazon come up with the tech , then you'd see people screaming :

"40,000 deaths per year! Young children, pregnant mothers!!! Release the IP, now!!"

And of course government would follow the mob and force them to do so.

Again, off they go to start a cryptocurrency or in the internet advertising business.

The incentives for saving the world just went down.

There sane way to do this is to buy the patents for a few hundred billions. A small price compared to the benefit these companies have provided the world.

It's ridiculous in the first place that BioNTech received almost half a billion in public funding specifically to develop the vaccine and yet own 100% of the rights privately.

Weighing the lives of billions against intellectual property claims and turf.

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Pay the companies whatever they demand to do whatever it takes to get everyone vaccinated asap. Now and into the future.

Graciously award everyone involved Freedom Medals™.

Then later, claw back any and all windfall profits thru radical cashectomies.

Pragmatism is so obvious and easy. And depressingly uncommon.

I feel like this is killing the goose that laid the golden egg. The Covid vaccines are one of the greatest success stories of modern medicine ever, and are literally worth trillions.

I want the companies and investors in the pharmaceuticals that have made these to become fabulously wealthy as an incentive for companies to invest in the capabilities to produce these.

I want creating a successful vaccine to be a bigger deal economically than creating a worldwide social network.

Who is doing a better job of increasing human well-being, Facebook or Moderna?

The stock of these companies dropped on this announcement. Long term this kind of patent waiver will drive investment and at some level smart people from these companies.