You can’t fight a pandemic without IP: Intellectual property rights were vital in producing life-saving Covid vaccines

News: Recent data from ‘Our World in Data’ suggest Covid-19 related infection around the world and India is waning. Hospitalisations and deaths are very low.

Vaccines must take great credit for keeping Covid largely out of the headlines after two years. There are now 10 Covid-19 vaccines recommended by the WHO, and over 60 vaccine candidates in late stage clinical trials or pending regulatory review.

How have IPRs played a critical role in quick vaccine development?

The intellectual property (IP) rights have given companies ownership and rights over their inventions.

– IP has enabled dozens of research collaborations and manufacturing partnerships all over the world, often between competitors. Rivals have shared proprietary compounds, platforms and technologies to develop new vaccines and flood the market in record times.

– Since June 2021, the number of vaccine manufacturing partnerships has risen from 93 to 357.

What are some concerns related to IPR?

Health NGOs and some governments argue that developing countries will get speedier access to new vaccines if IP rights are suspended so that manufacturers everywhere can produce them.

Others argue that patented drugs and vaccines by increasing price create deadweight loss for the consumers, negating the idea of endogenous growth models that innovation leads to economic growth and prosperity.

That argument drives a World Trade Organisation proposal to dismantle IP rights for Covid vaccines, now in the final stages of negotiation. Meanwhile, an equal push to weaken IP rights in a new treaty on Pandemic Preparedness is in its early stages at the WHO.

• A deadweight loss is a cost to society created by market inefficiency, which occurs when supply and demand are out of equilibrium.
• Endogenous growth theory maintains that economic growth is primarily the result of internal forces, rather than external ones. It argues that improvements in productivity can be tied directly to faster innovation and more investments in human capital from governments and private sector institutions.

What happens if IP rights are diluted?

Removing or weakening IP rights for pandemic vaccines and therapeutics would be highly counterproductive, undermining the incentive to invest in new technologies and treatments.

– IP rights allow for risk-taking that brings rewards – such as the first mRNA vaccines that underpin global Covid vaccination.

Removing IP rights in pandemic situations would also destroy the international manufacturing collaborations and partnerships essential to saving millions of lives in the current pandemic.

If IP rights are weakened, few private sector companies would be willing to commit resources to pandemic vaccines and therapeutics. This would leave the world reliant on alternative open source or IP-free models of drug and vaccine development.

– One IP-free vaccine from the University of Helsinki was unable to secure funding for clinical trials, while Corbevax, another patent-free vaccine developed by Texas Children’s Hospital has been authorised for use in India, but there is no public data on its efficacy or clinical trials.

If successful, IP-free vaccines could prove useful additions to the pandemic preparedness arsenal. But these patent-free models face difficulties in securing the capital and expertise to rapidly scale up global production. In other words, they would be unreliable if needed quickly in another pandemic.

By contrast, vaccines that have leveraged IP rights have moved quickly through clinical development, regulatory authorisation, and into mass manufacture and distribution.

What’s the way forward?

The TRIPS Agreement already gives flexibility to the individual countries to minimise the deadweight loss that may arise from higher drug and vaccine prices.

– For example, any individual country may decide not to grant patents to diagnostic, therapeutic and surgical methods for treating patients.

Many other governments are already subsidising patented drugs to lessen the impact of drug price rise. Jan Aushadhi outlets in India are a step in that direction.

There’s also a need for greater global harmonisation of regulation.

Meanwhile, various trade barriers have disrupted vaccine availability globally. Governments should agree on a legally-binding way to ensure this can’t happen again, preferably at the WTO.

Covid has shown what works and what doesn’t in pandemics. IP is clearly fundamental. It would be a mistake to remove it, either for Covid or for future pandemics.

Source: This post is based on the article “You can’t fight a pandemic without IP: Intellectual property rights were vital in producing life-saving Covid vaccines” published in The Times of India on 26th May 22.