Want a COVID-19 vaccine fast? Then keep government hands off drug companies’ patents
It’s full speed ahead on the scientific front in the fight against COVID-19. Researchers at labs large and small are developing potential vaccines and therapies at record speed. Rapid diagnostic tests have been developed. Drug companies are repurposing old drugs. We’re on track to have an arsenal of vaccines and medicines for the novel coronavirus within a year.
This should come as a surprise to no one. Because of its strong protection for intellectual property, the United States has been at the forefront of pharmaceutical innovation for decades. Quite simply, we are now better prepared to seek solutions to a pandemic than any other country in the world because public policies designed to promote innovation have created a thriving industry here.
How troubling and short-sighted it is, then, that Rep. Jan Schakowsky, an Illinois Democrat, and other House leaders have called for policy changes that would undermine this culture of innovation. They want to strip the scientists working to defeat the coronavirus of intellectual property protections for the lifesaving innovations that come out of their work.
This pledge came on the heels of a global push from Doctors Without Borders urging political leaders to preemptively seize patents on COVID-19 vaccines and therapies, claiming these efforts will “ensure availability, reduce prices and save more lives.”
What nonsense. They have taken aim at a straw man. The entire health care community has assured the public that COVID-19 breakthroughs will be disseminated as widely as necessary. Private research companies have pledged to produce diagnostics, antivirals and vaccines at little to no cost to patients. Insurers are waiving copays and other out-of-pocket costs for testing and treatment. Unsubstantiated fears of price gouging should not be allowed to derail ongoing efforts to address this major public health challenge.
Eliminating intellectual property protections for medical breakthroughs poses grave risks. Such moves would not only reduce incentives to develop coronavirus treatments as quickly as possible; they would also destroy the domestic industrial base that could be the key to stopping the next pandemic.
Take this historical example that highlights the value to the public of patent protection. At the onset of America’s involvement in World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt called on companies to develop and mass produce a lifesaving medicine that could beat back lethal infections from battlefield wounds: penicillin. At the time, this wonder drug was known to kill bacteria in a laboratory setting, but it was unavailable in large quantities.
A few businesses rose to the president’s challenge. Pfizer, then just a fermentation company, was among them. It found a fermentation process to produce penicillin on a wartime scale. Company leaders risked a lot — had they failed, Pfizer might have been out of business.
Thankfully, they did not. On D-Day, Pfizer manufactured 90% of all penicillin sent to soldiers overseas.
Pfizer also helped the war effort by sharing its fermentation process with other firms. Eventually, 19 companies helped work on a drug meant not just for soldiers, but for anyone at home fighting a bacterial infection.
Pfizer continued production after the war — and built on its patented processes in new lines of research, helping to usher in the age of antibiotics in the 1950s.
Research companies used derivatives of penicillin to develop dozens of new antibiotics, and also invented therapies such as macrolides and cephalosporins — entirely new drug classes. The revenues from those medicines enabled Pfizer to fund additional research, patent more and more therapies, and become the industry giant it is today. Indeed, Pfizer’s Zithromax, a descendant of its early penicillin efforts, is a potential COVID-19 fighter.
If the government had taken away Pfizer’s original intellectual property for manufacturing penicillin, none of this future progress would have been possible.
Now, almost eight decades later, we face another world war, this time with coronavirus. The world is counted on science to deliver — and it will. But if governments strip away intellectual property protections from new vaccines and therapies, they will set an uncertainty-inducing precedent that will discourage the funding researchers need to explore other potential uses for today’s discoveries.
By undermining the intellectual property rights that incentivize medical progress, we would compromise our response to this pandemic — and the next one.
Christopher Holman is a professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law, where his primary research focus lies at the intersection of intellectual property and biotechnology. He also serves as a senior scholar at the Center for the Protection of Intellectual Property at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School.
This story was originally published May 1, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Want a COVID-19 vaccine fast? Then keep government hands off drug companies’ patents."