Vaccines and the limits of intellectual property

These ever-so-welcomed vaccines we're getting shot with bring to front of mind the injustice and profiteering which can underlie our reliance on private, profit-driven actors to supply essential social needs. 

The U.S. government -- that means we, the taxpayers -- put up billions of dollars to ensure that pharmaceutical companies did the work and dared to invest in creating these magic shields against the coronavirus. And a very proper use of our common goods it was. 

But should our government use its cash and influence to ensure that, as vaccination advances speedily here, the whole world will have access? We've pledged $4 billion toward an international effort and are sending vaccine supply not needed here to Canada and Mexico. Our more civilized politicians insist we must do more. 

Democratic lawmakers and advocacy groups are pressing [President Biden] to go further by supporting a request by India, South Africa and 55 other countries for the World Trade Organization to waive patent protections on vaccines. Those countries argue that would enable manufacturers around the world to copy the formulas and massively increase production.

Drug companies, including the ones making the vaccines now authorized in the U.S., widely oppose the move, which they say would undermine the global response to the pandemic and not have the intended effect of speeding up production. The Trump administration opposed it at the WTO. But House Democrats say they have already collected close to a hundred signatures on a letter urging Biden to change the U.S. position. Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) also have weighed in. Those critics accuse the drug companies of prioritizing profits over saving lives.

Here's Senator Sanders:

The discussion raises the perennial issue of whether governments must create such generous protection for patents -- for the exclusive right of companies to profit from inventions that often take their germs from government funding and public academic institutions.

The economist Dean Baker took on excessive deference to patents in The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer. He believes so deeply in freeing vital information that you can get the book for free at the link. Here are some snippets of Baker's argument:

In policy discussions, patents and copyrights are usually treated as part of the natural order, their enforcement is viewed as being as basic as the right to free speech or the free exercise of religion. In fact, there is nothing natural about patents and copyrights, they are relics of the Medieval guild system. They are state-granted monopolies, the exact opposite of a freely competitive market. The nanny state will arrest an entrepreneur who sells a patent-protected product in competition with the person to whom it has granted a patent monopoly.

Patents and copyrights do serve an economic purpose — they are a way to promote research and innovation in the case of patents, and a means of supporting creative and artistic work in the case of copyrights. However, just because patents and copyrights can be used for these purposes, it does not follow that they are the only mechanisms or the most efficient mechanisms to accomplish these purposes.

… It is necessary to have mechanisms for supporting innovation, and many alternatives to patents and copyrights already exist. The government directly funds $30 billion a year in biomedical research through the National Institutes of Health, a sum that is almost as large as the amount that the pharmaceutical industry claims to spend. A vast amount of creative work is supported by universities and private foundations. While these alternative mechanisms would have to be expanded, or new ones created, in the absence of patent and copyright protection, they demonstrate that patents and copyrights are not essential for supporting innovation and creative work. The appropriate policy debate is whether they are the best mechanisms.

My emphasis. A worldwide pandemic which can only be defeated on a worldwide basis should bring this discussion to the fore even in this country where we so often assume we have the best form of "free market" anywhere.