Williams, Law Office of Jeff Williams Intellectual property attorney

Leigh Phillips had a very useful piece in Jacobin on how patent protections are impeding progress in developing and distributing vaccines or treatments for the Coronavirus. The piece points out how the United States has engaged in a pointless competition with the rest of the world, which has involved trying to procure control over a potential vaccine. It also points out how pharmaceutical companies are planning to charge exorbitant prices that are likely to limit access, especially in developing countries.

All of this is very true and important for the public to know, but where the piece goes badly off the mark is in the punchline in its subhead: “But the real architect of these crimes is not CEOs or shareholders, but the market.”

The reason this is so far off the mark is that the clear villain in this piece is government-granted patent monopolies, which exist as a result of the government, not the market. If we envision a world where these government-granted monopolies did not exist, all of the problems (and more) that Phillips mentions would not exist. Without patent monopolies, and related government protections, drugs would be cheap.[1] They are almost invariably cheap to manufacture and distribute.

This means that the problems Phillips points to would disappear in the absence of patent monopolies. It would be absurd to fight over a race to develop a vaccine, since as soon as a vaccine was developed, any manufacturer in the world would be equally able to produce it, regardless of where it originated. And a vaccine, or any drugs that are useful treatments, would be available as cheap generics. That could still raise issues of affordability in the poorest countries, but that is a problem of poverty, not the high cost of drugs.