Watch Out for a Vaccine Patent Heist

The left wants Biden to force drug companies to give away their IP

WSJ editorial. Excerpts:

"Patent-breakers are presenting a false choice between protecting intellectual property and public health. Breaking patents won’t accelerate vaccine production or distribution to poor countries. Pharmaceutical companies are ramping up manufacturing as fast as they can, including in low-income countries.

Merck is reconfiguring factories to produce Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine, while Novartis and Sanofi are making Pfizer -BioNTech’s mRNA shots. Novavax has tapped Baxter BioPharma Solutions and Endo International. The Serum Institute of India plans to make a billion doses of Novavax this year. J&J has enlisted Aspen Pharmacare in South Africa and Biological E in India.

In short, vaccine developers are already sharing their IP. Covid mRNA and vector-vaccines are complicated biological products that require expertise to manufacture. Even if the WTO suspended patent protections, India and South Africa still couldn’t make vaccines without cooperation from the developers.

WTO rules already allow low-income countries to force drug makers to license patents for medications during “national emergencies” or “other circumstances of extreme urgency” such as HIV or tuberculosis epidemics. But the WTO can’t make drug makers share their expertise. So what’s the point of the WTO campaign?

Answer: To bully pharmaceutical companies and Western governments to donate more vaccines. World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who supports the WTO campaign, last week called the gap between vaccines distributed in rich and poor countries “grotesque.”

What’s really grotesque is the left’s failure to understand that private innovation and investment benefit everyone. Covid vaccines are now available because of decades of research and tens of billions in investment by U.S. and European companies into vaccines for other infectious diseases, which kill more people in poor countries than Covid does. The AIDS/HIV death rate in South Africa is nearly three times higher than for Covid.

There would be more deaths if not for medicines developed in the U.S. and Europe. In 2012 J&J introduced the first novel treatment for multi-drug resistant TB in nearly half a century. About 2.5 times more people died of tuberculosis in India in 2019 than have from Covid.

Profits enabled by patents provide the incentive to innovate. J&J and AstraZeneca, both diversified giants, have agreed not to profit from Covid vaccines. But Novavax and Moderna have been investing in vaccine research for years—more than 30 in Novavax’s case—and their Covid shots are their first success. Companies won’t continue to invest if they aren’t allowed to make a profit.

As for inequitable distribution, U.S. and European governments have donated billions of dollars to a WHO-backed initiative to distribute vaccines to poor countries. AstraZeneca has promised to allocate nearly two-thirds of its vaccines to the developing world. J&J has pledged up to 500 million doses, and Novavax 1.1 billion.

Low-income countries may have to wait a little longer for vaccines, but the European Union and the U.S. account for 10% of the world’s population and 40% of Covid deaths. That’s in part because their populations are much older, and Covid mostly kills the elderly. The faster vaccines are distributed in Europe and U.S., the sooner their government lockdowns—which have caused economic damage and increased poverty in low-income countries—will ease."