Tennessee Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn has introduced a measure to prevent the Biden administration from waiving intellectual property rights for COVID-19 vaccines, a strategy she argues would let other countries profit from private U.S. investment.
The bill, known as the No Free TRIPS Act, was introduced earlier this month with the aim of preventing India and South Africa from gaining IP rights for the mRNA vaccines developed in the United States to produce them within their own borders for their people. If passed, the bill would compel the Biden administration to get approval from Congress before moving to lift patent protections afforded by the World Trade Organization’s Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights agreement.
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“President Trump’s Operation Warp Speed proved the lifesaving capabilities of the private sector, but for some reason, the Democrats are on a mission to stop this innovation in its tracks,” Sen. Blackburn told the Washington Examiner. “I am leading the charge to stop Joe Biden’s plan to waive the intellectual property rights of vaccine manufacturers.”
Blackburn’s bill already has support from a handful of Republican senators, such as Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.
“Without the power of free-market innovation, we will lose any chance we have at successfully managing another global public health crisis,” Blackburn said.
The Biden administration has supported the global push to share IP rights with poor countries struggling to vaccinate the masses. South Africa and India sponsored a proposal at the WTO in an effort to expand vaccine access, and the U.S. subsequently backed it.
Variants of COVID-19 that have had devastating effects in the U.S. have all arisen in other countries, a point that the Biden administration argued compels the sharing of vaccines worldwide. The delta variant, for instance, which at its peak was killing about 2,000 people per day, was first discovered in India. Meanwhile, the omicron variant was first discovered in Botswana and South Africa, just as the delta variant’s onslaught was fading in the U.S.
“The news about this new variant should make clearer than ever why this pandemic will not end until we have global vaccinations,” President Joe Biden said about omicron in November.
But the possibility of having to share the vaccine formulas that were developed with U.S. funding outraged the pharmaceutical industry and trade groups that represent it. PhRMA, the giant organization that represents the pharmaceutical industry, argued, for instance, that lifting patent protections on vaccines is a misguided attempt to fill the vaccine access gap between wealthy and poor countries.
“[Biden’s policy] flies in the face of President Biden’s stated policy of building up American infrastructure and creating jobs by handing over American innovations to countries looking to undermine our leadership in biomedical discovery,” PhRMA CEO Stephen Ubl said. “This decision does nothing to address the real challenges to getting more shots in arms, including last-mile distribution and limited availability of raw materials.”
Some liberals, though, have accused drug companies of opposing the relaxation of IP rights out of greed. “It is unconscionable that amid a global health crisis, huge, multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical companies continue to prioritize profits by protecting their monopolies and driving up prices rather than prioritizing the lives of people everywhere,” Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent socialist who caucuses with Democrats, said in a YouTube video last year.
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Many poor countries have relied on vaccine donations from wealthier countries. The U.S. has been the largest funding source for COVAX, an initiative to distribute COVID-19 vaccines to poor countries. While representatives of the pharmaceutical companies argue that donating doses is the best bet to reaching the elusive “herd immunity” threshold, donations alone likely will not be sufficient to close the vaccine equity gap. Getting the world vaccinated would require outfitting manufacturers in other countries with the necessary capacity to manufacture doses of the complex vaccines at a large scale, said Dr. Ashish Jha, a public health expert who now serves as the czar of Biden’s COVID-19 response task force.
“The one sort of simplistic thing that people often say, ‘Oh, this is all about intellectual property and we should just take these patents and make them public.’ It’s not about that. There aren’t that many companies that can make these things,” Jha said last year. “They’re actually complicated to make … and it’s got to be done incredibly well.”
