A TRIPs waiver will not only impede vaccine production at this moment, it will also cause long-term harm. There are two principal concerns in this regard. First, a waiver for COVID-19 vaccines will obviously decrease the incentive for companies to make vaccines for the next disease. "The recent rhetoric will not discourage us from continuing investing in science," wrote Bourla, the Pfizer chief. "But I am not sure if the same is true for the thousands of small biotech innovators that are totally dependent on accessing capital from investors who invest only on the premise that their intellectual property will be protected."
Second, a TRIPs waiver will eliminate the most important of the barriers to China making sophisticated vaccines: patent protection. Reuters reports that the Biden administration does not want a waiver to aid the Chinese pharmaceutical industry and believes it can address this issue "through the WTO negotiations," but unfortunately it "did not specify how."
Of course, the Biden administration cannot stop Chinese companies once patent protection is waived. Furthermore, Beijing is not going to adhere to the terms of the waiver. As Reuters tells us, "Enforcing limits on use of the technology could be very difficult."
Chinese ruler Xi Jinping a year ago said China's vaccines would be made available as a "global public good," but Beijing has not offered them as such. Instead, China has offered its vaccines to other countries on extraneous and harsh conditions, such as de-recognition of Taiwan or the purchase of 5G networking gear from Huawei Technologies.
So why should the United States support China's biological weapons program to enable another deadly attack? That is exactly what Biden is doing with his proposed TRIPs waiver.
President Joe Biden is moving to surrender to China U.S. patent and trade secret protections on America's COVID-19 vaccines. Why should the United States support China's biological weapons program to enable another deadly attack? That is exactly what Biden is doing with his proposed TRIPs waiver. (Photo by Justin Tallis/AFP via Getty Images)
President Joe Biden is moving to surrender to China U.S. patent and trade secret protections on America's COVID-19 vaccines. Two of those vaccines, made by American-based Pfizer and Moderna, employ revolutionary mRNA technology.
Specifically, the Biden administration has agreed to support a request by India and South Africa for waivers that would permit members of the World Trade Organization to not enforce laws protecting patents and trade secrets covered under the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights Agreement (TRIPs).
"This is a global health crisis, and the extraordinary circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic call for extraordinary measures," declared U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai in a May 5 statement. "The Administration believes strongly in intellectual property protections, but in service of ending this pandemic, supports the waiver of those protections for COVID-19 vaccines."
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