Yes, Corona is spreading too fast in big business community, not as a disease, of course, but something far worse.
The race to develop a vaccine for Covid-19 is not just about saving lives during a pandemic, it’s also about owning the most lucrative patent. This gives the owner monopolistic control over the manufacturing and distribution of the vaccine in the countries where the patent rights are granted.
Of course, there are countries where even if patent ownership is in the hands of private companies, the state may still have the right to use them for its own purposes or in the case of emergencies.
When private companies and government institutions partner on developing a vaccine, it may result in joint ownership of a patent. This gives each owner the right to manufacture the vaccine, but only together they can license the manufacturing to third parties.
So, the rat race is on, though due to state-level involvement, the possibilities of any cut-throat competition have been minimized. Luckily, or perhaps unfortunately, Pakistan is also in this race. Here, like in two other countries, production and export of this drug is totally in private hands. Pakistan’s M/s Ferozons Laboratories Ltd. would make the medicine in partnership with America’s Gilead, which developed remdesivir. The government again has opted to remain out of this effort.
A number of research journals have raised concerns over such a situation. Some of them, like Linear Clinical Research Handout, even believe that whosoever invents a coronavirus vaccine will control the patent – and, importantly, who gets to use it.
Similarly, Natalie Stoianoff of University of Technology Sydney says, “With research laboratories around the world racing to develop a coronavirus vaccine, a unique challenge has emerged: how to balance intellectual property rights with serving the public good.”
But is anybody seriously interested in the latter?
Questions of patent protection and access to those patents has prompted an international group of scientists and lawyers to establish the Open COVID Pledge.
This movement calls on organizations to freely make available their existing patents and copyrights associated with vaccine research to create an open patent pool to solve a global problem.
The EU is leading the charge to create such a pool by drafting a resolution at the World Health Organization. The US, the UK, and a few others have been opposed to this idea.
Instead, universities, public-funded research institutes, and pharmaceutical and biotechnology corporations are working on vaccine research through international consortia or public-private partnerships. If one group does develop a viable vaccine, this raises other questions that will soon need to be addressed: who is funding the research, and who has the rights to any patents coming out of it? Can governments compel the owners of those patents to license other manufacturers to make the vaccines or medicines?
In Pakistan, considering the political power the pharma industry sways over public-sector decision making, the answers are obvious.
