The biopharmaceutical industry has collaborated with researchers, governments and other partners to develop and produce almost 7 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccine in around 20 months.
It has been a remarkable and hugely successful global effort.
Yet, if you ask those in favour of waiving intellectual property protection for the vaccines, apparently not.
What a coincidence that people with a longstanding and outspoken opposition to strong intellectual property protection for medicines and vaccines would use the pandemic as a platform to progress their ideological agenda.
Their sudden appearance gives the unfortunate appearance of viewing the pandemic as a strategic opportunity to progress their anti-patent agenda.
The truth is that rather than hindering the global vaccine effort, patents have been fundamental to ensuring their rapid development and mass production.
Does anyone really believe the world would now have 7 billion doses of vaccine in the absence of patents?
It is as if some people believe these vaccines would have just magically appeared.
If not biopharmaceutical companies, exactly which organisations would have conducted the late-stage clinical trials involving tens of thousands of people and committed the required capital and manufacturing capability?
Waiving patents will not make manufacturing facilities magically appear in Djibouti or resolve the global shortage of the resources required to produce vaccines.
The industry has done much of the heavy lifting and now proponents of the waiver want to pilfer the resulting intellectual property.
The real risk of a waiver is that it will lead research-based companies to exit from the development and production of COVID-19 vaccines. That is, it will only limit the future development and production of vaccines.
Seriously, what is the relationship between patent protection and rich countries like Australia choosing to vaccinate children ahead of frontline health workers and vulnerable populations in developing countries?
The Australian government is amongst around 100 countries supporting the waiver at the World Trade Organization.
Australia was absolutely hopeless in the early period of the pandemic. It was left way behind as other countries entered advance purchase agreements with companies like Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Moderna and Novavax.
In the end, Australia lucked out because of the willingness of AstraZeneca and CSL to enter a three-party agreement under which the UK company contracted the Australian counterpart to produce the adenovirus viral vector vaccine developed under a collaboration with The University of Oxford.
Would a patent waiver have made any difference? Probably only in so much as there would not have been a vaccine for CSL to produce.
It is extraordinary that Australia, a country that was essentially 'saved' by the willingness of a company to share their intellectual property, is now supporting the move to revoke the protection that made vaccines possible in the first place. It is a special kind of cognitive dissonance.
