I wrote a piece a little more than a year ago about how intellectual property rights are getting in the way of global vaccine equity, condemning a lot of people to die in lower-income countries. There have been various initiatives to address the situation. A piece in Nature by Amy Maxmen today highlights somewhat encouraging news on this front in the form of a consortium of sites across Africa, Asia and South America working to develop mRNA vaccines and manufacturing capacity. Part of the goal is to deal with Covid – but it’s also to redress the fact that many places are suffering from not just Covid, but tuberculosis, HIV, malaria and other problems. Developing local capacity will help get vaccines to those who need them, as well as preparing researchers in these countries to respond to new pandemics.
Of course, this is a tremendous challenge, as Maxmen details It should surprise no one that patents are getting in the way:
“Despite the hub’s efforts, next-generation mRNA vaccines might still be entangled in patent thickets if some components of the technology have been claimed by others. An astounding number of patents — estimated at more than 80 — surround the mRNA vaccines, according to one analysis. A thorny IP landscape isn’t as daunting for big companies with the capital to litigate, explains Tahir Amin, a lawyer and co-founder of the Initiative for Medicines, Access & Knowledge (I-MAK), a non-profit group based in New York City. Amin says that the hub could boldly move forward, too, and harness public condemnation if Moderna or other companies file a lawsuit. But this option is off the table because the Medicines Patent Pool vows not to infringe on patents. Indeed, the agency’s model relies on persuading pharmaceutical companies to voluntarily license their technologies to alternative manufacturers, often in exchange for royalty fees”
Moderna appears to be a particularly bad offender:
“Moderna did not respond to requests from Nature for comment. But in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Moderna’s chief executive Stéphane Bancel said that the company won’t impede Afrigen’s work in South Africa; he made no mention of the 15 larger companies working with the hub. He added, “I don’t understand why, once we’re in an endemic setting when there’s plenty of vaccine and there’s no issue to supply vaccines, why we should not get rewarded for the things we invented.””
Maybe it’s time to remind everyone of the amount of public money that supported Moderna’s vaccine development, or that the company is on track to record $19 billion in revenue this year (Maxmen does both in the article). Bancel’s language invokes tired and slippery uses of “endemic” to minimize Covid. All “endemic” means is that a disease is spread at a more-or-less constant (and deemed acceptable) rate, without big surges. Since the world is still suffering from big surges of Covid, Bance’s claim is straightforwardly false. It’s also ignoring the moral and medical issue; if large numbers of people are dying from something (Covid, tuberculosis) it’s not acceptable, even if it comes at a predictably steady rate.
But even if the claim about endemicity were true, the rest of the sentence is still false. Very few people in low-income countries have been vaccinated, which means that the claim that there’s “plenty of vaccine” is wrong. It might be the case that there is plenty of vaccine here in the U.S., but if it’s not getting into the arms of Africans, then there by definition not “plenty” of vaccines there, and it is also an issue to supply them: the measure of success is vaccinations, not vaccines in a warehouse. Finally, Bancel pulls the oldest trick in the IP maximalist’s arsenal: to equate the ability to extract monopoly rents with the ability to profit at all. If you want to achieve social welfare, then pharma should get just enough IP protection to incentivize product development and not a penny more.
Overcompensating Pharma mints billionaires, but it’s still social murder.
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