Recent news about Pfizer’s and Moderna’s progress synthesizing a Covid-19 vaccine has been met by an understandably ebullient global reaction. According to the CDC, the first batch will be available to Americans before the end of 2020. Analysts believe that positive news about the vaccine – and really, how could the news be better? – explains much of the most recent surge in stock prices. More substantively, if the optimism were well founded it would not be unreasonable to expect a meaningful economic recovery. Especially given a few months.
We are so desperate for some good news (has the “Biden tide” already ebbed?) that it is makes sense for the press to present as auspicious a picture as possible. But let’s temper our optimism for a moment. The numbers no doubt appear promising; but none of the vaccine trials thus far have been published in peer reviewed journals. It is peer review that enables us to reliably control for variables such as gender, age, or severity of case, and thus obtain a more accurate picture of the vaccine’s expected effectiveness. Nor can we thus far know how long either vaccine will provide immunity. It is of course understandable that such impactful news could not wait for peer review results to come in. But it is for this reason important to keep in mind the potential limitations in the news stories.
Production of either of the new vaccines at the scale necessary, moreover, would be no mean feat. Keep in mind that at the required two per person we are talking about approximately 15 billion doses if everyone on Earth were to get a shot. Even short of that magnitude it is not difficult to imagine Covid-19 production displacing other vaccines like the flu shot and many others.
Other logistical bottlenecks are no less important. Chief among them is a potential dry ice shortage resulting both from a spike in demand for food preservation and a shortage of the liquid CO2 necessary to make the dry ice (itself a function of gas supply shutdowns earlier in the year). It matters because many of the doses will require medium- to long-term storage at extremely low temperatures (Pfizer’s, for example, at -70C or -94F). Such a constraint interacts in a major way with the scaling problem. And dosing everyone twice is much more than twice as complicated as doing it once; it requires ensuring that each of the hundreds of millions of people receiving the vaccine return precisely 21 days later for a second shot. How realistic is that?
As important as all the above concerns are, there are ethical matters to consider as well. One concerns the WTO’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, better known as “TRIPS”. Without getting bogged down in its details, TRIPS is an international agreement requiring signatory countries to respect the “property rights” possessed by an originating entity. To cite a common, if extreme, example, indigenous Amazonian natives are to be legally prohibited from using medicinal plants that have been patented by some multinational firm. Absurd? Indeed, but a TRIPS provision regardless. Needless, to say, developing countries are up in arms over the implications of the agreement on the availability of the Covid-19 vaccine for their populations. TRIPS implies that copying the formula would be akin to pirating.
It is for this reason that India and South Africa are seeking a waiver from certain provisions of the TRIPS agreement, in order that they may obtain easier and quicker access to the vaccine through their own laboratories. If successful, their petition would diminish the scaling challenge mentioned above, and ensure that many more would have access to the vaccine. It cannot be overstated how important it is that vaccines become available beyond rich countries if there is to be any hope of achieving global herd immunity. Ethical considerations aside, then, India and South Africa are correct that adhering to TRIPS makes no sense in the present context.
Is TRIPS defensible in general? I am no firm opponent of intellectual property, and anyway believe that the topic deserves more space than offered by such a brief post. The essential point for me is not so much whether the “producers” of intellectual property deserve exclusive rights to the appertaining revenue streams. What matters much more is what even qualifies as intellectual property. The concept itself ignores the fact that not every aspect of our lives should be commodified. [On this matter, if you have time for it, Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation a uniquely prescient cautionary tale]. Our capitalist system permits no distinction between consumer luxuries and human necessities such as food, health, and education (did I mention vaccines?). That idea that doses of the new vaccine should, in the interest of respecting intellectual property, be withheld from those not able to pay is quite simply an abomination.
The common argument favoring TRIPS or even patents in general is that failing to protect intellectual property or other products of innovation would stifle the incentive to pursue such novelties and discourage the necessary risk taking that leads to such breakthroughs. Like it or not, the argument is plausible in theory. But what presently makes it totally bogus is that research and development is increasingly publicly funded anyway. Where, then, is the risk taking? If someone offered me tens of millions to look into some possibilities I also would probably not hesitate. If risks are “socialized” or spread among the taxpayers, why do firms continue to privately appropriate the rewards?
When one considers contemporary government responses to crises in finance, the environment, education, and public health – to name only some of the more visible ones – the above question is possibly the most critical one we can ask these days. One cannot answer it without at least taking a closer look at the logic of capitalism. Alas, it will need to wait for a future post.