COVID-19, Patents, and Trade Secrets

Has the worldwide distribution of vaccines been impacted by patent rights? The answer is not at all. Nobody is enforcing patents to shut down others from doing anything. COVID vaccines are really hard to make. One of the challenges with the worldwide distribution of the vaccines is scaling up enough manufacturing to be able to provide vaccines for the whole world. Waiving patents—the right to exclude—doesn’t affect the manufacturing process. We would still have the know-how problem and the raw materials problem. There’re only limited raw materials worldwide making vaccines. There’s a limited number of manufacturing plants that are capable of making these vaccines. And there’s a limited number of skilled scientists that know how to make the mRNA vaccines. Those issues are not captured by the patent-waiver debate, which seems politicized and blown out of proportion.