What if we're treating this coronavirus the wrong way?
A reasonable description of someone playing politics with hundreds of millions of lives would be toad. Even, little toad. Which is the observation we might want to make about Nick Dearden, of Global Justice Now, here:
The charity Global Justice Now called the UK’s donations “a PR gimmick” that will allow the G7 to ignore the structural problem of intellectual property rules driving vaccine supply shortages.
It praised Biden and the French president, Emmanuel Macron, for supporting an intellectual property waiver.
Nick Dearden, the charity’s director, said: “Boris Johnson’s lofty promises to vaccinate the world have today been wiped out like a surfer in Carbis Bay.
“The UK has bought 500m vaccine doses; well beyond what we need. And yet today we’re only offering to give 100m doses to the rest of the world – and only by the middle of next year. It’s little more than a PR gimmick.
“Intellectual property rules are restricting vaccine production to the supply chains of a handful of companies. This weekend, Boris Johnson and Angela Merkel can finally step up to the plate, follow Biden’s lead, and clear away these barriers, so we can vaccinate the whole world.”
The problem is not in fact the intellectual property rules. Reality here is that every factory in the world – OK, maybe not in North Korea but….. – that is capable of manufacturing one or other of these vaccines is in fact manufacturing one or other of these vaccines. It is not a patent problem, it’s a skill and equipment problem.
We can indeed show this too. The Russian Sputnik Vaccine is not covered by any of those western world patents:
Russia is having, as this newspaper reports, considerable problems in producing the Sputnik V vaccine.
There is a global campaign to insist that all patents on all vaccines must be waived, invalidated even.
The first point shows why the second is irrelevant to beating Covid-19.
But then that is not what that second point is about anyway. Rather, there are still those out there who want to smash capitalism and yes, they will use any circumstance to do so.
As the report on the Russian problems goes there are significant difficulties in producing a vaccine. The new factory has to be constructed, the bioreactors tried out and then run in production runs.
The staff have to be found and trained. It’s necessary to assemble the supply chain – 150 different ingredients are not unusual in these new vaccines – and even then there is no guarantee that each reactor full of vaccine will actually be the correct stuff.
And here is the thing – there are no patent problems here at all.
This is a Russian developed vaccine, it is their own intellectual property.
Making stuff for the first time is hard. This is why we have IP in the first place of course. But even when IP isn’t the problem it is still true that making stuff for the first time is hard. Which is what the problem over vaccine supply is, not the IP, but the difficulty of manufacturing.
This doesn’t interest Nick Dearden because that’s not what he’s interested in. Instead he wants to overthrow capitalism:
This is the battle that is actually being fought, using Covid-19 as an excuse.
If the political activists can convince that, in these special circumstances, drug patents should be violated then it becomes much easier to make the same argument again and again.
Until there is their desired world in which there is no intellectual property – and therefore no one creates anything new that can be copied.
Dearden is using the coronavirus vaccines to play politics. To overturn the very idea of intellectual property, of patents upon drugs. He’s using the deaths of millions to play politics. Ghastly little toad that he is.
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"Ghastly little toad." That.
These pesky property rights are keeping us from even more giveaways to show the world What We Are Like. (What We Are Like is thieves.) Aren't we lucky that "Covid changes everything," even our job descriptions and oaths of office!
The conclusion is correct: The mere rhetoric is making the world less safe for him who would work late to develop the next miracle cure.
"The problem is not in fact the intellectual property rules. Reality here is that every factory in the world – OK, maybe not in North Korea but….. – that is capable of manufacturing one or other of these vaccines is in fact manufacturing one or other of these vaccines. It is not a patent problem, it’s a skill and equipment problem."
I keep hearing that.
But if it's true, then what's the problem with the IP "waivers?" If waiving the IP isn't going to result in more places making vaccines (without paying royalties), then the patent-holders and their allies arguing against it don't have anything to worry about, do they?
While I'm personally against the anti-property anti-concept of "intellectual property," the big issue in this particular case, so far as I'm concerned, is one that goes to the IP waiver opponents' other main argument:
"If the IP on these vaccines is waived, that's a disincentive for us to spend all this money developing the stuff."
Except, well, most of them didn't spend all that money developing the stuff. Governments handed them pallets of taxpayer cash to develop it, and pledged advance orders of large quantities of it, and handed them the first-to-production and first-to-market advantage, all tied up in a pretty package with a bow on top.
Now they're harumphing about the possibility that they may have to compete for future sales (while simultaneously saying no, they wouldn't). But if there really is such a thing as "intellectual property," they're not entitled to claim ownership. They performed a work for hire, and the IP rightfully belongs to the people who hired them.
"But if there really is such a thing as “intellectual property,” they’re not entitled to claim ownership. They performed a work for hire, and the IP rightfully belongs to the people who hired them."
Depends on the contract. When - if - I write for The Times that is Times copyright. When - if - I write for The Register it's my copyright.
So, what does the contract say?
I don't know what the contract says.
But, then, the whole contract was illegitimate from the start. The state stole the money to pay for the development of the vaccine. Any IP associated with the vaccine belongs to the people the money was stolen from, not to the thieves or to the recipients of the stolen funds.
Thomas, try looking at some facts. Oxford funded the first £1m or so for intial development work for the AZ vaccine out of its own (collective) pocket. Only AFTER that did the UK government step in with some intermediate funding prior to the deal with AZ| which provided a lot more before it got to the stage that HMG put down a substantial prepayment to pay for mass-production facilities.
If his object is to criticise capitalism, a more promising, and probably more useful approach would be to query why the use of Ivermectin or Hydroxychloroquine has been ridiculously rubbished. We are told that these drugs are not safe- yet they are given out weekly in areas with malaria or river blindness, caused no safety problems, and indeed were formally tested as safe before going into use. Every effort to conduct double blind testing, which is claimed to be the only acceptable standard has been blocked- meanwhile we use a totally untested lockdown to counter covid. The only reason I can think of for this is that no-one can make any money out of either drug.
Of course we might find that the current level of testing requirements are excessive, that drugs can be safe enough with less onerous testing than currently required, as appears to be the case with vaccines, and hence brought to market sooner, with lower development costs and a longer period for the developer to recoup his costs. Though good luck getting that acknowledged- it would threaten the jobs of a lot of regulators and lower the barriers to entry into the pharmaceutical industry.
Orange man bad? After all the tale that the horrid chinese produced the horrid virus in their horrid lab has become much more acceptable now that Trump isn't pushing it.
Pat, the Emergency Use Authorisation (via which the Frankenjabs have been allowed to be used), states that experimental medicines may only be used if there is no current treatment for a disease or illness. Ban Ivermectin and HCQ et voila', there is no current treatment for covid so let's fire up the science lab. Trebles all round.
Every effort has not been blocked. Hydroxychloroquine was tested as part of the RECOVERY trial - see https://www.recoverytrial.net and found to be ineffective. Ivermectin was not tested, but there is no reason to expect it to be effective - the antiviral properties observed were at doses much higher than would be safe in people (it's a treatment for parasites).