India’s WTO Petition Would Undermine American Innovation | Barron’s
On the scene of American innovation: President Joe Biden tours a Pfizer manufacturing site on Feb. 19, in Kalamazoo, Mich.
President
Joe Biden
has restored Americans’ confidence in the government’s Covid-19 response. With the quiet competence of a practiced hand—and without a single Twitter outburst—he has secured congressional approval for a nearly $2 trillion economic rescue package and accelerated vaccine distribution to America’s most vulnerable.
In the months ahead, he’ll face an even bigger challenge: ensuring the world’s most vulnerable have access to Covid-19 vaccines, too.
This isn’t just a moral imperative; it’s an economic one. No one is safe until everyone is safe, because viruses don’t respect borders. Defeating this pandemic once and for all—and preventing the rise and spread of deadlier, more easily transmitted variants—will require vaccinating a substantial share of the global population.
The international vaccination effort will no doubt be a topic of conversation tomorrow, when Biden meets virtually with Indian Prime Minister
Narendra Modi.
In fact, Modi will likely lobby Biden to support an Indian petition to the World Trade Organization that would allow member states to suspend intellectual property protections on Covid-19 vaccines and treatments.
India claims that gutting IP protections will expand poorer countries’ access to those lifesaving shots. But that’s not true—and Indian leaders know it.
India’s petition is a thinly veiled attempt to boost its drug industry. It’d undermine innovation here in the United States and hurt patients around the world for years to come. That’s why the European Union, United Kingdom, Japan, and the United States have strongly opposed this petition thus far.
Intellectual property protections, such as patents, give innovators the right to own and market their inventions for a set time. 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.
Far from impeding patients’ access to new drugs, IP protections encourage companies to create drugs in the first place.
Contrary to India’s claims, suspending IP protections won’t speed up Covid-19 vaccine production. Every drug manufacturing facility on the planet that’s capable of churning out Covid-19 shots is already doing so. But there are almost 8 billion people on Earth. Even if we max out production—and we are—it’s going to take over a year to fully vaccine the global population.
Modi surely knows this. India is a drug manufacturing powerhouse. The Serum Institute of India has already contracted with vaccine developers like
AstraZeneca
to make hundreds of millions of Covid-19 shots. All told, India is set to produce over 3.6 billion Covid-19 vaccine doses this year, second only to the United States’ 4.8 billion.
As Serum Institute CEO Adam Poonawalla recently noted, vaccine developers have liberally contracted with manufacturers in India and elsewhere, but it “just takes time to scale up [production].” In other words, IP protections aren’t the cause of vaccination delays.
India’s petition wouldn’t get shots in patients’ arms any faster. But it would give India’s scientists access to decades of insights and know-how from American researchers—Modi’s real goal. The petition would set a dangerous precedent, allowing Indian generic firms to copy American and European companies’ innovative medicines years before the patents are set to expire.
That would have dire long-term implications. The Moderna and
Pfizer
vaccines were developed using mRNA, an approach that holds enormous potential for other diseases. But if the IP behind those vaccines is suddenly exposed for all, it could dramatically lower the value of these platforms—and thus discourage further investments into these revolutionary technologies.
Deterring such investments could hamper the fight not only against other diseases and future pandemics, but also against Covid-19 itself. After all, we’ll likely need additional vaccines and treatments to combat future variants.
Rejecting the Indian petition doesn’t mean the Biden administration can’t take immediate action to expand global access to the vaccines.
As just one example, we should donate our extra vaccine doses—both to Covax, the international body promoting global equity in vaccine distribution, and directly to vulnerable communities across the globe. Money and distribution know-how should also be shared.
Modi’s petition is unreasonable and disingenuous; it’s a ruse to benefit India’s own industry at the expense of patients everywhere. President Biden would be wise to reject it.
Howard Dean, a physician, is the former chair of the Democratic National Committee and former governor of Vermont. He is a senior advisor with the public policy and regulations practice at Dentons.