Biden’s Patent Madness
When the Biden administration announced in early May that it supported suspending global intellectual-property protections for COVID-19 vaccines, much of the world applauded. Advocates for the waiver of the so-called Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) argued that relaxing patent rights for the medicines developed by Pfizer, BioNTech, Moderna, AstraZeneca, and Johnson & Johnson would enable generic manufacturers the world over to produce much cheaper yet equally effective vaccine doses in mass quantities and swiftly distribute them to the neediest places on the planet.
“This is a global health crisis,” U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai said in a press release, “and the extraordinary circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic call for extraordinary measures.” While the Biden administration “believes strongly in intellectual property protections,” its “aim is to get as many safe and effective vaccines to as many people as fast as possible.” And so, she said, America would support a pending petition before the World Trade Organization (WTO) to waive TRIPS protections.