The 4M difference between total cases and recovered is people who are what?
Biden’s Vaccine IP Debacle
- Thread starter Daal
- Start date
Ex-Prez Dump luuuuuves Debt.
Anyway when you have wealth (he don't) that takes care of debt.
You sound really jealous lmao
You sound confused.
How about an answer instead of posters TRADING insults back and forth?
USA Population 333 million. If everyone in the USA got COVID and there was a 99.99% survival rate that would translate to 333,000 deaths. USA COVID deaths so far: 580,000, and certainly not everyone has gotten the virus. Your 99.99% survival rate is obviously inaccurate.
Those are not China virus deaths. They are any deaths of a person that tested positive for China virus within a month of the death
many false positive tests is the problem. And also counting flu deaths as China virus deaths
My guess is the Article is inaccurate. I don't think anyone in a position of authority is talking about "suspending IP". Probably the suspension being considered is a suspension of IP fees, not IP itself! One has to assume, and with the present administration we've been given no reason not to, that this government is not going to do something that would on its face be ridiculous. The last paragraph of the article is certainly a gross overstatement, in any case.https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-vaccine-ip-debacle-11620341686?mod=opinion_lead_pos1
"
We’ve already criticized President Biden’s bewildering decision Wednesday to endorse a patent waiver for Covid vaccines and therapies. But upon more reflection this may be the single worst presidential economic decision since Nixon’s wage-and-price controls.
In one fell swoop he has destroyed tens of billions of dollars in U.S. intellectual property, set a destructive precedent that will reduce pharmaceutical investment, and surrendered America’s advantage in biotech, a key growth industry of the future. Handed an American triumph of innovation and a great soft-power opportunity, Mr. Biden throws it all away.
***
India and South Africa have been pushing to suspend patents at the World Trade Organization for months. They claim that waiving IP protections for Covid vaccines and therapies is necessary to expand global access, but their motivation is patently self-interested.
OPINION: POTOMAC WATCH
Free Beer for the Vaccinated? States Try to Lure Arms
00:00
1x
SUBSCRIBE
Both are large producers of generic drugs, though they have less expertise and capacity to make complex biologics like mRNA vaccines. They want to force Western pharmaceutical companies to hand over IP free of charge so they can produce and export vaccines and therapies for profit. Their strategy has been to shame Western leaders into surrendering with the help of Democrats in the U.S.
NEWSLETTER SIGN-UP
Opinion: Morning Editorial Report
All the day's Opinion headlines.
SUBSCRIBE
But suspending IP isn’t necessary to expand supply and will impede safe vaccine production. The global vaccine supply is already increasing rapidly thanks to licensing agreements the vaccine makers have made with manufacturers around the world.
Pfizer and BioNTech this week said they aimed to deliver three billion doses this year, up from last summer’s 1.2 billion estimate. Moderna increased its supply forecast for this year to between 800 million and a billion from 600 million. AstraZeneca says it has built a supply network with 25 manufacturing organizations in 15 countries to produce three billion doses this year.
AstraZeneca and Novavax have leaned heavily on manufacturers in India to produce billions of doses reserved for lower-income countries. But India has restricted vaccine exports to supply its own population. IP simply isn’t restraining vaccine production.
Busting patents also won’t speed up production, since it would take months for these countries to set up new facilities. Competition will increase for scarce ingredients, and less efficient manufacturers with little expertise would make it harder for licensed partners to produce vaccines.
There’s also the problem of safety. Johnson & Johnson has experienced quality problems at an Emergent plant making its vaccines, and that’s in Baltimore. Imagine the potential problems with unlicensed producers in, say, Malaysia or Brazil. If vaccines made there have complications, confidence in licensed vaccines could plummet too. And who would Pfizer and Moderna sue to get their reputations back?
The economic self-damage is also hard to fathom. The U.S. currently has a competitive advantage in biotech and biologics manufacturing, which could be a growing export industry. Waiving IP protections for Covid vaccines and medicines will give away America’s crown pharmaceutical jewels and make the U.S. and world more reliant on India and China for pharmaceuticals.
Moderna has been working on mRNA vaccines for a decade. Covid represents its first success. Ditto for Novavax, which has been at it for three decades. Small biotech companies in the U.S. have been studying how to create vaccines using nasal sprays, pills and patches.
Thanks to Mr. Biden, all this could become the property of foreign governments. Licensing agreements allow developers to share their IP while maintaining quality control. Breaking patents and forcing tech transfers will enable China and low-income countries to manufacture U.S. biotech products on their own.
China’s current crop of vaccines are far less effective than those in the West, but soon Beijing might be able to purvey Pfizer knock-offs. The U.S. has spent years deploring China’s theft of American IP, and now the Biden Administration may voluntarily let China could reap profits from decades of American innovation.
***
Instead of handing over American IP to the world, Mr. Biden could negotiate bilateral vaccine agreements and export excess U.S. supply. If Mr. Biden wants to increase global supply safely, the U.S. could spend more to help the companies produce more for export. Then the jobs would go to Americans. We thought this was the point of the production deal Mr. Biden negotiated between J&J and Merck.
Alas, this President seems to be paying more attention these days to Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Nancy Pelosi. They think vaccines and new drugs can be conjured by government as a public good with no incentive for risk-taking or profit. This really is destructive socialism.
Mr. Biden ought to listen to Angela Merkel. Pfizer’s partner BioNTech is a German firm, and the German Chancellor said Thursday that she opposes the WTO heist: “The protection of intellectual property is a source of innovation and it must remain so in the future.”
At least IP is safe in Germany. Mr. Biden has sent a signal around the world that nobody’s intellectual property is safe in America.
"
However the concern that advanced biotechnology might be transferred to nations where IP is not secure, along with the right to produce the mRNA vaccines, is a valid one. The way this should be handled, and I imagine it will be, is to produce all of the vaccines in western countries where patent protection is respected, and then ship the vaccines to underdeveloped countries allowing them access to the vaccine they need at low cost, subsidized jointly by the U.S. and U.S. Pharma. It's the right thing to do. We'll be making an even bigger mistake if we don't recognize the importance of facilitating, with help from our European and North American Partners, vaccination of the entire world. I imagine that this will in fact be how we do it, while still protecting valuable IP. We would be buying only time in any case, because eventually, of course, Countries like India, that badly need more vaccine now, will be able to develop mRNA vaccine technology on their own, as they have more advanced biotech capability already then many are aware of. Let's not be naive.
Last edited:
I have a bad feeling that what the administration means by "patent waiver" is being grossly misunderstood by some media, maybe intentionally in some instances. By the way, Carter was neither wimpy nor useless, but he was a Washington outsider whose effectiveness was harmed by that, and he was, at the same time, unlucky. Any comparison between Carter and Biden would be superficial. Biden is the consummate "insider", and he has appointed many highly competent insiders to key positions in his administration.
After wasting time to comment on the OP, I realized that the whole thing can be dismissed as an absurd political hit piece. If something is patented it is disclosed for the whole world to see, but that does not mean it would be easy necessarily for someone to put the patent into use. The IP disclosed in a patent is only protected in countries that are a party to international patent law and even then only in countries in which you have bothered to obtain a patent. Any additional protection comes from weak proprietary knowledge ancillary to the patent itself. Biden can not give away patented IP because it is already in the public domain. He certainly has no unilateral power to change patent law. The entire article is an absurdity. Any talk of a "patent waiver" would simply be concerning a waiver of fees, and undoubtedly only temporary, and that would be something the patent assignee would control. Biden could influence the assignee of course. The entire OP is ridiculous, nothing but a cheap inept political hit aimed at the extremely naive. .. This is the Kind of thing I'd expect from FOX, but this came from some other political hit shop... WSJ, owned by FOX. This has got to be a huge embarrassment to the WSJ, that still has today a few fairly sophisticated readers left. Their editors really screwed up on this one.
Last edited: