The lethal dishonesty of ‘intellectual property’ in a pandemic

See updates through November 30, 2021, at end of post.


When I saw the headline for a Washington Post story, I knew what the argument would be. Because it really isn’t a new argument.

In essence, capitalists insist that innovation requires incentive. Incentive means profit. Profit means intellectual property rights.

And, according to capitalists, those intellectual property rights must be upheld even when an international shortage of vaccines will allow the novel coronavirus to develop new variants that may evade the vaccines they have developed. The technology the pharmaceutical companies have developed for COVID-19 vaccines will be used in future vaccines and drugs. This technology is difficult to replicate, manufacturing capacity has had to be expanded dramatically, and it can’t all be done overnight.[1]

The opposition points out that people are dying for lack of the vaccines and that, as variants are born, the vaccines (I receive my second shot of the Pfizer vaccine this coming Friday) themselves become useless. And more people will die. Some of those variants may be more lethal, meaning even more people will die.[2]

Both arguments rely on a counterfactual. The questions here really are, first, would it have been possible to develop these vaccines so rapidly in another system besides capitalism? I have to think the answer here is yes. Because I really don’t see greed as a functional motivation for research.

In human science, we prefer the term ‘inquiry’ to the term ‘research.’ Inquiry is about questions. It is about curiosity. It is about the pursuit of answers rather than the answers themselves.

Greed, on the other hand, is about something far baser. It’s about lining one’s pockets. When it happens in research, it leads to various forms of intellectual fraud, like doctored results, like plagiarism. It retards progress rather than furthers it. And indeed, as I hear from passengers in my car, it leads to haste, a haste many distrust.[3]

Second, would it be possible to scale up manufacturing capacity in another system besides capitalism? This is harder, because as we know, greed is a powerful incentive, but I just don’t see how, intrinsically, it could not be done.

The Washington Post story points to a company in Bangladesh, Incepta, that is being ignored in its requests to license the technology to produce the vaccines, implying that the intellectual property holders are not doing all they can to ramp up production. The intellectual property holders insist that they have to be able to trust those they license the technology to,[4] implying that they do not trust Incepta.

We don’t know, at least from this story,[5] why the intellectual property holders distrust Incepta. Though the article repeatedly points to what may be a bias in favor of North America, Europe, and India.[6] Again, this is unexplained.

What we do know is that people are dying for want of the vaccine and that more will die if they don’t get it.

What we also know is that intellectual property is really a rather dubious concept. It relies on a notion of a “lone genius.” But that “lone genius” isn’t really alone. S/he lives in a social context that often leads others to develop the same ideas. Multiple people may develop an idea, but the winner, the one who gets the patents, the one who gets the copyrights, is really an arbitrary choice.[7] That multiple pharmaceutical companies have developed COVID-19 vaccines suggests that something similar has happened here. Which in turn suggests that the intellectual property argument for limiting who can produce badly needed vaccines is dishonest.

That dishonesty is killing people.


Update, March 30, 2021, revised, April 3 and 4, 2021: Because the COVID-19 vaccine rollout has been so uneven around the globe, in part due to drug manufacturers’ insistence on preserving their intellectual property ‘rights,’[8] new, deadlier, and more contagious variants of the novel coronavirus[9] will require new vaccines within a year.[10] This is apparently without even considering vaccine hesitancy in countries that have access to the vaccine.[11]


Update, April 3 and 4, 2021: Footnotes have been enhanced relating to vaccine hesitancy and the problem of COVID-19 variants, both in the original text of this post, and in the update of March 30, 2021.


Update, April 24, 2021: It seems that intellectual property[12] is not the only problem the developing world has in manufacturing vaccines.

“The point the Secretary (of State Antony Blinken) has made repeatedly is that as long as the virus is spreading anywhere, it is a threat to people everywhere. So as long as the virus is spreading uncontrolled in this country, it can mutate and it can travel beyond our borders. That, in turn, poses a threat well beyond the United States,” [State Department spokesperson Ned] Price said in responses to questions.[13]

So what is the U.S. doing? Restricting raw materials India, which is suffering a dramatic and likely woefully understated increase in COVID-19 cases,[14] needs to manufacture vaccines. The U.S. is maintaining Donald Trump’s “Amerikkka first” stance, claiming its first obligation is to vaccinate its own people.[15]


Update, April 30, 2021, revised, May 1, 2021: The Biden administration has partly reversed[16] its earlier idiocy, in which it refused to allow exports of raw materials for vaccines to India.[17] The country faces utter calamity with a COVID-19 surge, and India’s government, which has diminished the severity of the problem, bears considerable blame.[18] The U.S. now promises both vaccines and the raw materials to manufacture those vaccines.[19]


Update, May 3, 2021: It looks like, even as some semblance of normalcy returns, COVID-19 will be with us for a very, very long time.[20] A short version is that as people refuse the vaccine or are difficult to reach to be vaccinated, COVID-19 variants have the opportunity to arise. Some may be more lethal. Some may be more contagious. Some may “break through” vaccines.[21]

The picture is complicated. A lot of people, including myself, may never know if we have been infected with COVID-19,[22] even if they—I have never been tested—were tested (at least when the tests were new).[23] To the extent we were infected and subsequently vaccinated, we may be more broadly immune to variants.[24] That, in turn, could eventually limit the ability of variants to spread.[25]

I had less severe side-effects with the second dose of the Pfizer vaccine, suggesting a possibility that I might previously have been infected,[26] but there is a huge confounding variable in that, anticipating more severe side effects following the second dose,[27] I went home that afternoon instead of going right back to work as I had with the first dose. So the bottom line remains the same: I don’t know. And probably a lot of people in my risk categories won’t either.

“It’s really just kind of a reflection of how unique each of our systems are, what other immunities we have,” Dr. Mark Loafman, chair of family and community medicine for Cook County Health in Illinois, told NBC 5. “Each of our immune systems is a mosaic composite of all that we’ve been through and all that we have and all we’ve recently been dealing with.”

“Our individual response varies,” Loafman said, but everybody experiences an “appropriate immune response” for their own body.[28]

It’d all be simpler if we could look forward to a day when COVID-19 was going away. But with so many people refusing to be vaccinated and with significant segments of the population that are difficult to reach, even when they are willing to be vaccinated, that’s looking less and less likely.[29]


Update, May 5, 2021: It seems there are also problems with manufacturing capability—mRNA vaccines require special technology to produce—and a potential competition for ingredients,[30] but

The Biden administration on Wednesday threw its support behind a controversial proposal to waive intellectual property protections for coronavirus vaccines, with liberals framing it as a necessary bid to speed the shots to billions in the developing world, while the drug industry warned of devastating effects to vaccine production.

U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai said the United States will now move forward with international discussions to waive the protections for the duration of the pandemic. U.S. officials helped block a World Trade Organization proposal that was introduced last year to stop enforcing patents for coronavirus-related medical products. Dozens of developing countries have pushed for the proposal, arguing that it would allow them to rapidly produce their own generic vaccines, rather than wait months or years for sufficient doses.[31]

The final agreement may also look rather different from what’s presently proposed.[32]


Update, November 26, 2021:

The highly contagious variant, has double the number of mutations of the Delta variant and is currently driving an explosion of cases in the region around Johannesburg, South Africa’s commercial capital.

Late on Thursday evening, Britain put six southern African countries – South Africa, Botswana, Lesotho, Eswatini, Zimbabwe and Namibia – on a revamped red list and said it would stop flights on Friday until a system was put in place to quarantine passengers.

Israel quickly followed suit suspending all travel to and from South Africa. On Friday the European Union said it would propose banning travel from southern Africa.

The new variant, which is likely to be named ‘Nu’, was first discovered in Botswana, but cases have been detected in Hong Kong. Scientists say it is almost entirely behind an explosion of cases in Southern Africa’s Gauteng Province in the last week.[33]

This will likely be attributable to a failure to distribute vaccines internationally.

Update, November 27, 2021: I guess the new variant will be “Omicron” rather than “Nu.” I liked the latter name better.

WHO [World Health Organization] said there was also preliminary evidence that the variant, which it named Omicron after the Greek letter, was more transmissible than the Delta variant that is currently dominant world-wide, and other virus strains. Health authorities in Belgium, Israel, Hong Kong and Botswana said they had detected first cases of the variant.[34]

The variant seems to be spreading rapidly around the world, with a few folks pointing to a failure to distribute vaccines internationally, and seemingly rendering attempts to control it by limiting travel laughable. The hope, I suspect in vain, is that travel restrictions will buy a little time. Finally, while it’s early, perhaps too early, it looks like the vaccines still work.[35]

Dr. [William] Hanage and other researchers said that vaccines will most likely protect against Omicron, but further studies are needed to determine how much of the shots’ effectiveness may be reduced.[36]

Virologist Barry Schoub, the head of South Africa’s Ministerial Advisory Committee on COVID-19 vaccines, told Israel’s Channel 12 news that based on initial data from cases in South Africa, it seemed the vaccine would still protect most people from severe COVID-19. . . .

Schoub’s position was far more mellow than that of some other health experts around the world, who have reacted with alarm to Omicron, which has more mutations to its spike proteins than any previous strain of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.[37]

“I am worried that as the numbers go up, public healthcare institutions are going to be overwhelmed,” said Rudo Mathivha, the director of critical-care medicine at Johannesburg’s Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital.

The WHO made no mention of the variant’s potential impact on the effectiveness of Covid-19 vaccines. Omicron has more than 50 mutations compared with the coronavirus that was first detected in Wuhan, China, in 2019. More than 30 of those mutations are in the spike protein, through which the virus attaches to human cells and which is the main target of the current crop of Covid-19 shots. . . .

If needed, a BioNTech spokeswoman said, the companies could produce a new vaccine adjusted to any variant within six weeks and ship initial batches within 100 days.[38]

The difficulty with new vaccines will be that, while they wouldn’t require all the testing needed for the initial vaccines, it will take some time to determine if they are even needed.[39]


Update, November 30, 2021: Apparently, negotiators are working on a ‘pandemic’ treaty to improve international response to pandemics like COVID-19 in the future. But if indeed, “[w]hen threatened, governments don’t often think globally,” but rather, “[t]hey look out for themselves,” and, indeed, “[c]ountries have a habit of ignoring international agreements when it doesn’t suit them — the already-existing 2005 International Health Regulations that set out a new way of responding to outbreaks, albeit with little detail or enforcement, have been repeatedly ignored during the pandemic,” what confidence can we have that they’ll abide by a treaty if one is agreed?[40] Gotta tell ya, this ain’t makin’ a whole lot of sense.


This is, and has been from the beginning, an absolute shitshow.

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