International protections for intellectual property are essential to fighting COVID-19, explains BIO President and CEO Dr. Michelle McMurry-Heath in an article published in the Economist on Tuesday.
Catch up:On Monday, Dr. Michelle McMurry-Heath sent a letter to U.S. Trade Representative Ambassador Katherine Tai explaining why a proposal to waive WTO’s Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) regulations for COVID medicines would actually hinder pandemic efforts.
We have “a public health and humanitarian imperative” to expand vaccine access worldwide,Dr. Michelle writes in the Economist. This requires “more global collaboration and significantly more investment by developed countries like America.”
But removing IP protections removes the incentive to develop drugs. “The policies that enabled firms to produce lifesaving technologies at historic speeds are now under attack,” she says. Waiving them “tells the successful firms and their investors that the results of their effort can be appropriated by anyone in the world.”
Companies had been working on these vaccine technologies for a LONG time. Years of prior research into mRNA allowed Moderna, Pfizer, and BioNTech to produce vaccines rapidly—and Dr. Michelle says her former colleagues at Johnson & Johnson “leveraged their knowledge from developing an Ebola virus vaccine to quickly develop an inoculation against COVID-19.”
And biotech firms pay for many failures on the road to success: “Before the pandemic ends, billions of dollars will have been spent on vaccine candidates and potential therapies that will never come to market or earn a penny.”
Instead of attacking IP, developed countries must lend support—through collaboration, distribution assistance, and vaccine sharing.
Read the whole thing.