(Drivebycuriosity) - The Biden administration is considering to waive the patents for the Covid-19 vaccines. These patents create temporary monopolies. No one else can use the same formula without paying a license fee. The vaccine patents protect the vaccine creators and allow them to make profits to recover the costs of creating these patents. Similar intellectual property protections are very common, they exist for example in the publishing industry, no one else can publish a Grisham or a Harry Potter novel or a text book without paying the publisher (which explains the high prices for text books). The songs by Kanye West and million other music creators are also protected.
Waiving the patents for vaccines would do more harm than good. At the begin of the Covid-19 pandemic (March 2020) the Wall Street Journal reported that "no fewer than 30 Big Pharma and small biotech firms are racing for treatments and vaccines" ( marginalrevolution wsj). All these companies spend a lot of money, but only a fraction of them succeeded. Today only four vaccines are permitted in the US, Great Britain and the European Union: Moderna, Pfizer/Biontech, Johnson & Johnson and Astra Zenecca. The rest lost money, a lot.
Creating - and investing in new pharmacies - is a lottery. Developing new vaccines cost many millions and they have to survive through a row of clinical tests. Most projects get abandoned. They don`t get approval by the regulators because the vaccines were not effective enough or/and had severe side effects.
Waiving the patents would punish those who succeeded and who gave us the vaccines. Wouldn`t this not be very ungrateful? The vaccines by Moderna & Co. are saving the lives of hundreds of thousands and are sparing many more an enormous amount of agony. And everyone else also benefits from the vaccines. Since my wife and I got vaccinated - thanks to Moderna - we got our lives back. Now we can walk on the streets, go shopping, dine out and travel again without the fear to get infected.
The vaccines are ending the lockdowns and quarantines in the US and Europe. They save the economy because they make it possible that businesses reopen without causing a new wave of infection. In the US many shops & restaurants are already flourishing again. The swift economic recovery in the US - made possible by the vaccines by Moderna, Pfizer-Biontech and Johnson & Johnson - is worth trillions of dollars. COVID-19 vaccines are the only path to ending the pandemic, and their value must be measured against the pandemic’s costs (cei.org) . The cost of efforts to slow the pandemic in the U.S. via a nationwide shutdown of “nonessential” economic activities approach S7 trillion per year (roughly $20 billion per day), even without accounting for medical expenditures and valuation of lives lost (roughly a $2.5 trillion valuation of the 580,000 deaths so far chicagobooth.edu).
If the Biden Administration would waive the patents they would reduce the incentive to create new vaccines. Why should anyone invest into new expensive vaccine projects - with the high risk to fail in the clinical trial process - when even successful vaccines would not return enough profit to recover the cost?
Waiving the patents would especially harm Moderna, Pfizer partner Biontech and other biotech firms who developed vaccines based on the mRNA technology. They already advancing the new technology to fight more diseases, including cancer, AIDs and the flu, which would save many lives in the future. This leads to a lot of research and causes new costly trials of course. Why would the biotech companies invest so much money when Biden waivers their patents? Waiving their patents could even ruin the biotech industry which gives us the valuable vaccines ( spiegel).
Waiving the patents would slow down pharmaceutical innovation. Pharma and biotech firm would invest much less into new projects. Therefore fewer new vaccines would be created in future - if any. The lack of vaccines and other medicines in the future may kill millions of people in the future. And there might be no more vaccines against a new pandemic. Waving the patents would be moronic!
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