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Many of the scientists and activists who helped persuade Joe Biden to support an intellectual property exemption for Covid vaccines are urging the U.S. president to go further and force vaccine manufacturers to hand over their technology.
Scientists and progressive advocates welcomed last week’s decision by the Biden administration to support the rights of companies to enforce IP protections against Covid vaccines. But they say that if the administration wants to end the pandemic in the next twelve months, it must convince or force companies to share their knowledge with potential rivals in the developing world.
“The resignation was a big step, but the technology transfer should be next,” said Zain Rizvi, a researcher at Public Citizen, one of the groups that led the campaign for an intellectual property exemption. for vaccines. “The president must deploy all the authority and strength of his position for this to happen.”
Asia Russell, executive director of Health Gap, one of the global health organizations the Biden administration consulted in its decision to support the waiver of intellectual property, said: “We will not achieve this by asking pharmaceutically well. We must “Forcing companies to share their technology, we have to force it.”
The World Health Organization last year constitute a fund called Covax, according to which the richest countries fund the poorest countries to pay for vaccine doses. But vaccine doses are limited worldwide, and many rich countries soon got supplies by paying billions of dollars to help them develop.
Since the first Covid-19 vaccines were approved late last year, production has risen rapidly in richer countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States, but has increased it lagged behind in the poorest. While the United States has completely vaccinated 36% of its population, India, which has been devastated by the recent wave of infections, has only vaccinated 2.8%.
Scientists say division is not only a moral problem, but also a public health problem, if the virus is allowed to mutate and become resistant to the vaccine in unvaccinated parts of the world and spread to other places.
Katherine Tai, the U.S. trade representative, announced last week that the Biden administration would support the World Trade Organization to waive patent rights over Covid vaccines, in the hope that it would allow manufacturers around the world developing make their own vaccine copies.
But many experts say that even if the WTO waiver proposal guarantees the necessary support of all members, production will not increase fast enough. Instead, they want companies to deliver instructions on how to make their vaccines to other companies around the world, even if that ends up diminishing their own revenue.
They say it’s especially important to do this with mRNA vaccines like the ones made by BioNTech / Pfizer and Moderna, as they can be modified more quickly to deal with possible emerging variants.
Amy Kapczynski, co-director of the Global Health Justice Partnership at Yale Law School, said: “We need to vaccinate as many people as we can, as soon as possible. Many manufacturers are able to support production in the medium or long term without transferring technology. But to do so in the short term, technology transfer is essential. ”
Biden said last month, “I think we will be in a position to share vaccines and knowledge with other countries that really need it.”
But since then, no agreements have been announced between U.S. vaccine manufacturers and overseas manufacturers, which has led some to call for more aggressive measures by the administration.
One possibility is that the president could use his powers under the Korean War-era defense production law to leverage corporate technology on behalf of the government and then share it with other countries.
Another is that the government could use its own patents to force the hands of vaccine manufacturers. Modern, in particular, has used a patent on the vaccine without a license from the National Institutes of Health, which invented this technology.
Barney Graham, one of the NIH scientists behind the patent, he told the Financial Times last month it gave the government “leverage” on companies to boost global supplies.
Alternatively, the administration could create an organization that would act as a third-party intermediary negotiating technology transfer agreements on behalf of U.S. manufacturers.
The Clinton Foundation plays this role with HIV drugs and says it has helped reduce costs 100 times in certain parts of the world. The WHO has already launched a set of Covid-19 patents for companies to share their intellectual property and experts say this could also be a global technology agent if needed.
The White House made no comment, though administration officials say they are focusing on increasing supply to the U.S. and exporting it instead of helping establish overseas manufactures.
Many worry, however, that this policy will keep prices excessively high and not provide the speed needed to vaccinate the world before more worrying variants appear.
Matthew Kavanagh, an assistant professor of global health at Georgetown University, said: “This has happened before, so there is no reason why it can’t happen again. Companies need to tell the government, “Here’s our technology, you’ll find the people who make it.”
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