The plan doesn’t solve for extinction. Vaccines are not shared over borders; that continuously delays global protection, regardless of waiver status.
Arjun Padmanabhan and Tanner J. Wadsworth June 2022 (Arjun earned his law degree from the Texas A&M University School of Law, focused on intellectual property and international law, while also competing in moot court advocacy competitions at the national level. As a member of the Texas A&M Patent Clinic, Arjun assisted indigent clients in filing patent applications, while developing intellectual property litigation experience as an intern at several litigation boutiques in Fort Worth. He also served as Articles Editor on the Texas A&M Law Review, prior to law school, Arjun earned a B.S. in Industrial Engineering from the University of Miami. Tanner J. Wadsworth: Columbia University (J.D. 2022; James Kent Scholar; Executive Online Editor, Journal of Transnational Law); Brigham Young University (B.A. in Communications 2011), “The Post-Pandemic Order: A Blueprint For Balancing Health and IP Interests in the Age of Covid Variants,” Penn State Journal of Law & International Affairs, June 2022, https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/pensalfaw10&div=16&id=&page=) //AI-VB
While COVID-19 is a pandemic in the truest sense—its effects are felt worldwide—national governments have struggled to address it as a global issue or shed state-centric attitudes. In the same way that pharmaceutical companies think first about the interests of their shareholders, national governments tend to think first about the interests of their citizens. History has shown them to be hesitant to invest national funds into international enterprises, even when they might yield significant benefits for citizens. Accordingly, when a nation invests in a vaccine, it tends not to share it across borders.30 Despite initial good intentions—the presidents of both France and China made speeches arguing that COVID-19 vaccines should be treated as “global public goods” and made universally available regardless of their origin31—the COVID-19 vaccines have been no exception to this rule.32 At the outset of the pandemic, wary of the aforementioned temporal problem, wealthy governments created a lucrative market for COVID-19 R&D by setting aside billions of dollars to fund and buy vaccines.33 Spurred into action by the promise of tremendous profits, pharmaceutical companies raced potential vaccines through clinical trials while simultaneously engaging would-be buyers in bidding wars over potential doses. In these bidding wars, the same wealthy countries that put up the initial R&D money unsurprisingly came away victorious, locking up most doses before they were even on the market.34 The U.S. COVID-19 initiative, ambitiously called “Operation Warp Speed,” involved brokering deals with dozens of pharmaceutical companies, offering to contribute money toward research on the condition that the resulting vaccines be made available first to U.S. citizens.35 Other countries followed suit. By November 2020, as the race for a vaccine built toward a climax, the United States, UK, EU, and Japan had agreed to buy more than 300 billion doses between them, and there was little hope that China and India would share the results of their research programs with other nations.36 For poorer countries, vaccines were effectively sold out before they ever even hit the shelves.37