Vaccine Rules: Intellectual Property Rights and COVID-19

By SETH SANDRONSKY

As the coronavirus pandemic and its contagious variants rip across the US, the populace remains at-risk of infection, though some are receiving life-saving vaccines. The contrast between President Biden and his predecessor could not be starker. Meanwhile, there are different views of how to distribute the supply of vaccinations to the most people in the fastest way.

First, we turn to the pharmaceutical industry, a monopoly if one ever existed. Thomas Cueni is the director-general of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations. In a New York Times column Dec. 10, he opposed halting patents, or intellectual property rights, to speed up the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines during the global pandemic. (Uncle Sam grants patents to pharmaceutical corporations.) Patents paved the path for the record-breaking development of the COVID-19 vaccines, according to Cueni, and eroding them fail to make such life-saving medicine more available.

“It is unclear how suspending patent protections would ensure fair distribution,” according to Cueni. “But what is clear is that if successful, the effort would jeopardize future medical innovation, making us more vulnerable to other diseases.”

He continues to make his case. “Intellectual property rights, including patents, grant inventors a period of exclusivity to make and market their creations. Development of a new medicine is risky and costly.”

Two economists, Dean Baker and Arjun Jayadev, along with public health activist Achal Prabhala, disagree, in a Dec. 7 NY Times column. They write: “In fact, the novel technology at the heart of the Moderna vaccine, for example, was developed partly by the National Institutes of Health using US federal funds. Moderna then received a total of some $2.5 billion in taxpayer money for research support and as preorders for vaccines; by the company’s own admission, the $1 billion contribution it received for research covered 100 percent of those costs.”

What about Pfizer? “Pfizer, for its part,” write Baker, Jayadev and Prabhala, “received a $455 million grant from the German government to develop its vaccine, and then, by our count, nearly $6 billion in purchase commitments from the United States and the European Union.”

Cueni begs to differ with the trio’s argument. “The companies and investors who fund research shoulder so much risk because they have a shot at a reward,” according to him.

Motive matters. However, Baker, Jayadev and Prabhala see the production and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines under the intellectual property rights regimen as more about milking the taxpaying public. It foots the bill for patent-protected prescription medication twice, first via research and development and secondly at the retail counter. Think about that double billing the next time you pay a patent-protected price for prescription medication.

“The vaccines developed by these companies were developed thanks wholly or partly to taxpayer money,” according to Baker, Jayadev and Prabhala. “Those vaccines essentially belong to the people — and yet the people are about to pay for them again, and with little prospect of getting as many as they need fast enough.”

Seth Sandronsky lives and works in Sacramento. He is a journalist and member of the Pacific Media Workers Guild. Email sethsandronsky@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, March 15, 2021

Populist.com