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by photochemsyn 1476 days ago
Non-exclusive licensing is the far better option. This prevents monopolization and ridiculous price increases. As far as clinical trials by exclusive license holders, those have a rather poor record of producing reliable results over the long term in many cases (Vioxx of course, there are many others). The trials should really be independently run, not controlled by the very corporations that have a vested interest in seeing positive results so they can go to market.

As far as Covid-19 vaccines, there are actually many companies ready to go right to production if those patents are released to the public at this moment, and that would greatly increase supply, and that would benefit the whole world, instead of a handful of pharma CEOs and affiliated shareholders.
2 comments
jollybean 1474 days ago
- 'Non-exclusive' is a non-starter for most companies, there just won't be a license.

- Some type of independent trials might be possible, but there already is a lot of oversight. That's complicated.

- 'Releasing the patents'. I'm sure everyone in the world could release all of their patents for everything, and things would be good for about 2 years, but we'd likely never see another drug produced again, ever.

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kongolongo 1476 days ago
>As far as Covid-19 vaccines, there are actually many companies ready to go right to production if those patents are released to the public at this moment, and that would greatly increase supply, and that would benefit the whole world, instead of a handful of pharma CEOs and affiliated shareholders.

That's just conspiracy. Many companies have not been enforcing any patents related to covid vaccines. The reason why the developing world does not have high vaccine adoption is because of their infrastructure, not because of patent blocking.

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photochemsyn 1475 days ago
It's a valid issue and dismissing it as 'conspiracy' only weakens your argument. For example:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/03/covid-vaccine-...

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kongolongo 1475 days ago
It really is not. No where in that article does it even hint at patents being a primary limiting factor for the availability of vaccines in developing countries.

Of course not all companies are going to release their patents, but the fact there are several that already have, means its not the main problem. mRNA vaccines require extreme temperature controls during transportation and that incurs much more of a prohibitive cost in those countries than any amount of patent royalties do, even if there were no waived patents.

There are cases of huge shipments of vaccine donations going to developing countries that then go unused or underutilized because they do not have the resources to transport and distribute them effectively. Look at the COVAX initiative. The countries that failed to get vaccine rates up even with huge donations of vaccines lacked the infrastructure to distribute them whether it was the temperature controls or not having enough syringes.

"in Benin, only 267 shots were being given each day, a pace so slow that 110,000 of the program’s AstraZeneca doses expired...The vaccine pileup illustrates one of the most serious but largely unrecognized problems facing the immunization program as it tries to recover from months of missteps and disappointments: difficulty getting doses from airport tarmacs into people’s arms."[1]

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/02/world/europe/covax-covid-...

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