Latest news! The U.S. White House is looking into dropping intellectual property protection for new crown vaccines and drug therapies for other countries to have free access to, according to three people familiar with the matter. India, known worldwide for its generic drugs, may be the biggest beneficiary.
The U.S. waived intellectual property protection mainly: all medical technology applicable to the treatment or prevention of the new crown virus, including the new crown vaccine and new crown treatment drugs. Previously, South Africa and India made formal requests to the World Trade Organization (WTO) to waive intellectual property protection for medical technologies for neo-coronavirus until the pandemic ended, but the WTO did not resolve the issue.
Such a move would allow other countries to replicate existing neo-coronavirus vaccine technology. To date, three doses of vaccine technology have been approved in the United States.
The first was developed and produced by Pfizer Inc. of the United States and BioNTech, a company based in Germany.
The second was developed and produced by the U.S. company Moderna (Moderna).
The third is developed and produced by the American company Johnson & Johnson.
The subject of the White House study is to give up the intellectual property rights of the three new crown vaccines mentioned above.
A senior administration official said the White House convened a meeting of high-level policymakers on March 22 to study the relinquishment of intellectual property rights to the New Coronavirus medical technology.
The White House meeting was in response to a letter sent in late March by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) at the request of several Democratic House members from Oregon, Connecticut and Illinois. The letter has not been made public. But a senior aide said Pelosi supports the Democratic congressmen’s position, even if it is a temporary waiver of the new crown medical technology intellectual property, and urged the federal government to implement it as soon as possible.
“This issue expresses the idea that ‘we’re not really safe until the world is safe,'” one source said.
The report said there is growing concern that the United States and a few wealthy countries have the lion’s share of New Crown vaccines, while other countries cannot afford to vaccinate their own nationals against them.
The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative said saving lives and ending the pandemic remains “a top priority for the United States. The office will notify the World Trade Organization in writing once the U.S. federal government approves the abandonment of the New Crown vaccine technology.
Adam Hodge, a spokesman for the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, said, “As part of rebuilding the coalition, we are exploring ways to coordinate with our global partners and assess the effectiveness of saving lives through this waiver.”
The pharmaceutical industry, however, strongly opposes waiving patent protection for the new crown vaccine, unanimously fearing that doing so would undermine future incentives to innovate in the fight against the disease.
Clete Willems, former deputy director of the National Economic Council, shared the pharmaceutical companies’ concerns, saying that removing intellectual property protection for the New Crown vaccine would be a “dangerous precedent.
“The administration needs to avoid this trap, which would undermine decades of U.S. policy to protect intellectual property technology and (would) not directly increase the distribution of vaccines at all.”
A group currently consisting of the U.S., India, Japan and Australia aimed at countering the effects of one country’s global push for “vaccine diplomacy” announced an agreement to boost vaccine production in the Indo-Pacific region, where there is a shortage of Neocon vaccines. The group has set a goal of providing up to 1 billion doses of Neocon vaccine in the Indo-Pacific region by 2022.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 19 percent of U.S. adults, totaling about 15 percent of the total U.S. population, have already been vaccinated with the New Crown vaccine.
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