Astitav Khajuria
For the uninitiated in Patent Law, worldwide exclusive manufacturing rights to every new medicine are awarded to the company who invents it. Essentially, the right to exclusively make and sell the new medicinefor about 20 years are given to a company as a reward for taking a financial risk to do research. The logic behind this comes from incentivising people to invest in R&D activities for making humanity better prepared to fight diseases.
But this framework has a fundamental flaw. Due to the monetary power of western firms, most of the awards of patents of new medicines are secured by them. Simply put, since new knowledge is essentially generatedby standing on the shoulders of older knowledge,and western nations had the advantage of being the early starters in medical research, it is very hard and unjust for other relatively poorer firms- in nominal USD value- to compete.
You must be thinking, how it has anything to do with COVID vaccines? Well, the above-mentioned is the inherent problem. As per simple epidemiological calculations, we need to vaccinate about 70% of the whole world before we can expect some hints of real herd-immunity. Assuming 2 vaccines for per person for 70% people, we end up with a global demand of about 1100 crore doses.
Now, the orders for about 860 crore doses worldwide have been already placed. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Well, let us scratch the surface. Out of these 860 doses, 600 crores have been bought by the rich nations. To give you a perspective, 20% of the world population- which is about 150 core people- have bought 600 crore doses for them. The rest 80% of the world’s poor population don’t even have access to even one-third of the total vaccines.
The reason behind this imbalance is the fact, that except AstraZeneca, all other global vaccine manufacturers are charging high-margins on their products which deprive the poorer nations from accessing them. And in all sincerity, we cannot deny that vaccines of Pfizer and Moderna have shown to provide some of the highest efficacy rates.
By now, some of you must be thinking that India is already the world’s biggest producer of vaccines, why can’t we simply make these highly efficacious shots from Pfizer and Moderna in our ownfactories? Well, the answer to this lies in the international law, as I explained above, all the countries are bound with international regulations to respect the intellectual property rights of the inventor for at least 20 years. Another big issue here is that none of our Indian firms know how to make the new mRNA vaccines of Pfizer and Moderna. The mechanism behind manufacturing these vaccines is closely guarded behind patents.
I want to ask all western pharmaceutical firms and their parent nations a simple question:in the current times of crisis how can our collective human conscience allow us to maintain the status-quo? Why do earning super-profits is seemingly more important than saving global lives?
Just a few weeks back India with about 100 more countries pleaded the WTO for a limited, COVID-only lifting ofpatent-rights. What happened next? Countries like USA and UK fiercely opposed that proposal. These times call for a collective knowledge-sharing effort among all nations for fighting the virus. The world must agree to a temporary suspension of COVID-related intellectual property enforcement.
This is a time to share technologies, knowledge, and experiences in developing new drugs and medicines against COVID. This is not a time to hide knowledge behind opaque walls of patent laws. I am not saying that we should not incentivise the companies who researched for the vaccines; they can be paid appropriate royalties. Just that, the knowledge they have produced should be freely implementable without any penal actions on those who try use it in saving human lives in these times of crisis.
With the virus rapidly mutating,unfortunately, in a few months even the fully-vaccinated countries and their populations are going to be at a risk of reinfection. The only way to end this pandemic is by vaccinating the whole world in a relatively short span of time. But with the current setup around knowledge protectionism, it seems like the virus is not going away any time soon.
feedbackexcelsior@gmail.com
Trending Now
E-Paper
Follow our WhatsApp channel