Patent rights over human lives
The decision by the UK, EU, and U.S. to block a waiver on intellectual property rights on the COVID-19 vaccine is criminal.
Oh, so you thought this would be the moment we as the human race finally came together to defeat one common enemy?
Didn’t Boris Johnson tell the world to “overcome the extraordinary divisions created by coronavirus and unite to defeat the pandemic”?
Well friends, where there is money there is the absolute disregard for human life.
Human rights organizations have warned that 90% of people in 67 low-income countries are unlikely to be vaccinated in 2021 because wealthy nations have reserved more vaccines than they need and developers are not sharing their intellectual property.
By contrast, wealthy nations have enough doses to vaccinate their entire populations three times over by the end of 2021.
So I’m guessing the rest of the world is not invited to Joe Biden’s 4th of July COVID-independence day?
But you’d be mistaken if you thought the greediness ends there.
At the end of 2020, India and South Africa petitioned the World Trade Organization to temporarily suspend the intellectual property rules related to the COVID-19 vaccines and treatments.
The petition was supported by over 80 developing nations in hopes that waiving the patent rights would mean more countries would be able to produce the vaccine and immunize their populations against this deadly disease.
The UK, US, and EU blocked the petition two weeks ago.
Self-interest has no place in medicine
Patents are intellectual property rights which allow exclusive rights to pharmaceutical inventions and prevent drugs to be manufactured by other companies and sold at lower prices.
Not all medical inventions were protected by strict intellectual property though.
Frederick Banting discovered insulin in 1923 and refused to put his name on the patent and so, Banting’s co-investors James Collip and Charles Best sold the patent to the University of Toronto for $1.
University of Toronto then licensed the patent to companies worldwide so no single company could have monopoly over the hormone.
Banting was quoted as saying: “Insulin does not belong to me, it belongs to the world.”
Similarly, when the British physician and scientist Edward Jenner invented the smallpox vaccine in 1796 he did not patent it.
Owen Gover, manager of Dr. Jenner’s House Museum, said:
“Jenner didn't seek to make any money from his vaccine, he wasn't interested in patenting it,
“He just wanted people to know about it and he wanted to share it.”
In 1955 Jonas Salk, the American virologist and medical researcher who invented one of the first successful polio vaccines, was asked by Edward Murrow about who owned the patent to the vaccine.
“Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. This is — could you patent the sun?” Salk replied.
When penicillin was developed as an antibiotic in 1941 by Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, Florey decided not to patent the invention upon the advice of Sir Henry Dale, Head of the Medical Research Council, that doing so would be unethical.
What is happening today with the COVID-19 vaccine is tragic; the level of self-interest is inhumane.
When science and health care are businesses and when “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits” as Milton Friedman wrote, there is no room for solidarity and thus, no real prospect of development.
In the case of the COVID-19 vaccine, the developers have made it clear that although they hold the information to save millions of lives, they’d much rather withhold it and get rich(er).
The myth of Research & Development
“Creating a new medicine is a costly proposition.
Companies would never invest hundreds of millions in research and development if rivals could simply copy their drug formulas and create knockoffs,” wrote Howard Dean for the Barron’s Magazine.
What Howard is trying to explain here is that pharmaceutical companies would have no incentive, other than saving millions of lives, to create drugs if they weren’t able to reap billions of dollars in profits.
At this point, I should mention that Howard Dean is a Senior Advisor at the global corporate law firm Dentons.
Dentons has a large Intellectual Property practice that focuses on patent protection for pharmaceutical companies.
Howard himself is the Senior Advisor for the Public Policy and Regulation practice and he mainly focuses on the health care sector.
But while Howard has obvious interests in writing an article defending patent protection, his argument is a common one and should be debunked.
What this argument leaves out is that many medical inventions are in fact subsidised by governments.
In the United States (Howard’s country) Moderna received a total of $2.48 billion in Research & Development and supply funding from the government for its COVID-19 vaccine.
Johnson & Johnson received $1 billion in funding from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for its vaccine research.
AstraZeneca received $1.2 billion in funding from the U.S. government for development, production and delivery while Oxford received £65.5 million from the British government for the vaccine’s development.
In Europe, BioNTech received €375 million from the German government for the development of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine.
So you see, the “hundreds of millions in research” Howard talks about is actually taxpayer money.
And this isn’t a practice exclusive to the COVID-19 vaccine; research published in 2018 shows that between 2010 and 2016, total U.S. government funding for the research and development of drug companies was over $100 billion.
COVAX philanthropy
Countries unwilling to give up patent protections are engaging in an act of philanthropy through the COVAX scheme.
COVAX is led by the World Health Organisation, UNICEF, The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), Gavi and the Vaccine Alliance (Gavi); it aims at delivering COVID-19 vaccines to developing nations.
The United States, UK and countries in the EU are donor contributors to the COVAX Vaccines Advance Market Commitment fund which finances the distribution of the vaccine to the lower-income economies.
The COVAX initiative is looking to vaccinate 3.3% of the total population of 145 participant countries during the first half of 2021.
But wouldn’t waiving intellectual property rights increase the production of COVID-19 vaccines, making them more widely available?
It would also lower the price of the vaccines, enabling lower-income countries to purchase them in greater quantities .
Like other forms of philanthropy, the COVAX program seeks to manage a problem rather than tackling it at its roots.
This is by no means an attack on COVAX; it is a necessary program and hundreds of millions of people would be worse off if it did not exist.
However, more countries would be able to fight the pandemic if the production of the vaccines were more widespread.