With the lives at stake I think IP should be set aside and tech shared in the name of love and peace and stuff like that.
I would have a lot more sympathy for this viewpoint if we didn’t live in an IP and medical regulatory environment where in any other year, a company like Moderna can spend years having the ability to create vaccines on demand on short notice, and no way to bring them to market, because doing so normally takes on the order of a billion dollars and you generally only have a handful of years to make it back. There’s a reason that before covid, they were focusing on cancer instead of infectious disease, and it isn’t because they don’t care about preventing infectious disease. Hint: it’s the same reason no other drug companies focus on inventing new vaccines, they wouldn’t be able to say afloat if they did.
I’d have even more sympathy for this viewpoint if the US government had decided to say, “Hey, Moderna, this mRNA tech you’ve got is fantastic, you can create a vaccine in a few days and test it in a few months! Here, we’ll hire out your entire R&D capacity for the next decade to churn out as many vaccines for as many diseases as you can, and help you arrange to get them tested and through the regulatory process, and negotiate consistent licensing arrangements with any drug company in the world that wants to manufacture them.” Seems like it’d be one of the cheapest and most impactful humanitarian and public health interventions ever attempted. Or, you know, if we’d made any attempt at all to communicate to the public how amazing mRNA tech is and what it could mean for the world and why it’s worth supporting in general (which, of course, is something that has been reasonably clear in studies for quite a long time, but hasn’t been able to break through the incredibly high barriers to getting any new treatments, drugs, or other interventions to market).
