WASHINGTON: Four top Republican senators have urged US President Joe Biden not to accept a proposal by India and South Africa to the WTO to waive anti-Covid vaccine patents, saying that waiving all rights to intellectual property would end the innovation pipeline and stop the development of new vaccines or boosters to address variants in the virus.
Mike Lee, Tom Cotton, Joni Ernst and Todd Young, in a letter to President Biden, urged him to reject the upcoming proposal at the World Trade Organisation (WTO).
“The proponents of this scheme argue that if we just destroy the intellectual property developed by American companies, we will suddenly have more manufacturers producing Covid vaccines,” they said.
“But the opposite is true. By destroying the intellectual property of every American company that has worked on Covid vaccines and treatments, we would be ending the progress — started under Operation Warp Speed — that led to the fastest development of life-saving vaccines in history,” the senators wrote.
They alleged that some countries believe that they would benefit from seizing America’s intellectual property, but this is a mistake. The WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) requires countries to provide lengthy monopoly protections for medicines, tests and technologies used to produce them.
“Waiving all rights to intellectual property would end the innovation pipeline and stop the development of new vaccines. It also wouldn’t increase the supply of vaccines because of the tremendous time and resources needed to build new manufacturing plants. Even if the waiver may temporarily result in a few copycats attempting to produce what American companies developed, it would introduce major quality control problems,” the senators said.