Bernie: Suspend pharma patents. Make vaccines for whole world

I mean maybe, but would be better is if we focus on suspending Dr. Suess's patents

 

deserves its own intellectual property and patents thread

 

Sooo does this mean I can start making my own Moderna vaccine in my garage?

Im dont think I would want a generic vaccine at this point.

 

I would hope there would be some government agency in these respective countries that determines the safety and efficacy of generics.

 

Compensate the companies or the big ones will not prioritize a vaccine the next time we have a pandemic.

 

And encourage more Thneed production? You'd pretty much decimate what little chance we have of keeping what little forest cover we still have.

 

No

There are plenty of covid competitions and each of them are in a go-to-the-moon level race against each other to get approval and manufacture as many as possible. The for profit model here was extremely successful.

 

Don’t worry Bernie
Your friends the Russians are ALREADY doing this

 

Lot of truth to this. I feel confident Pfizer neglected to take government money in Warp Speed because they wanted to rush their science and reap profits on the mRNA technology later, (not necessarily from COVID).

 

This ignores the decades of leg work for mRNA research done at the public grant and research university level. The for profit pharmaceutical companies only came in when they see a profit motive in the near future where they could convince investors that it's profitable in the near term.

 

This is dumb in the sense that these companies spent billions of dollars on their research and took on huge risk. Many companies likely failed in their research and will be out tons of money. There's no incentive for companies to take these risks if government will just seize it after the fact, so you're setting yourself up for future medical problems and crises.

That said, there's an argument to be made that the governments of the world should get together and pay each of these of companies something like $50B to buy the rights to the vaccines and then release them into the public domain so every country in the world can manufacture their own and accelerate vaccination - it would more than pay for itself through increased activity from faster vaccination. And would eliminate a lot of the disparity of vaccine distribution between rich and poor countries.

This also ignores the fact that you need these companies to continue developing their vaccines to account for variant strains/etc. It's not like Moderna/etc's job is done now.

 

The government spends more on high risk research that is decades away from a profit motive. you should read up on the history of mRNA research. It all started in research universities and public grants.

Private companies are more averse to high risk research. They swoop in in the final stages where they are masters in effiency and mass production. That's where their true expertise lies. The underlying ground work for the research is only going to be taken on by a public effort.

Same applies to other sectors of research. There was no profit motive in the early days of space exploration. The first rockets to enter low orbit didn't have a profit motive. Private companies didn't see a use in it yet. Down the road eventually companies like SpaceX swoop in on the backs of decades of publicly funded research.

 

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/years-of-research-laid-groundwork-for-speedy-covid-19-vaccines

 

Of course all this is true - I'm not sure how it changes anything though. Private companies are still the ones that did that final leg. If it was easy, the public research would have come up with these vaccines - but they didn't. Good or bad, the reality is that the profit motive is what got those vaccines made in the end.

 

China and Russia are already vaccinating the rest of the world
Bernie keeps forgetting that there are much better communist countries than America
@Os Trigonum
@basso

 

Mexico is going with the Russians

They shouldn’t trust stuff from a country who hates Speedy Gonzales
@Os Trigonum

 

The public sector did most of the leg work. That's my point. Hence they should be given more of the credit. The for profit model is good at taking the research and finding an efficient method in mass producing it in tolerances that are easily distributable. That's what they are good at and yes, it's an important role but that role would be non-existent if it wasn't for the public will for high risk research that are years away from having any profit motive.

 

Oh absolutely - basic research is critical to everything the US does. If I were magically King of the US, I would slash so much different transfer spending and replace it with massive amounts into basic R&D. And I agree the work that's done there should get more credit overall, and frankly, companies should have to pay to monetize that research. I'm just thinking of this particular Covid situation. If this had been the plan from the start and taking Warp Speed money meant you gave away the vaccine (or got a flat payment for rights), I'd be all for it. It's just a hard and pretty crappy thing to do after-the-fact. That's why I suggested governments just offer a boatload of money to these companies for the rights.

There needs to be a lot of thought given to patent process changes for items in the public good - I think the price of insulin was mentioned in another thread somewhere, and that's a good example. But the rules have to be well designed and still encourage innovation/etc. Retroactively yanking patents by fiat seems to be the opposite of that, in my opinion. I think it would help solve this crisis and create a whole set of new ones.

 

You want communist vaccines
It is already happening
China got this !