COVID-19
Considering All Sides of Medicines Patents
For many years, policy experts and others have engaged in wide-ranging debates about patents on pharmaceuticals, particularly in developing countries. On the one hand, it has been argued that IP protection provides crucial incentives to the pharmaceutical industry to undertake more research on tropical diseases. On the other hand, the patenting of pharmaceuticals has been criticised as causing challenges regarding access to medicines. The brief examines in detail the rationale for patenting medicines. The examination includes an investigation into the role of the patent system in relation to the pharmaceutical industry, the moral limits of patents, how the exclusion of a patent can create social costs, the rationale for the patenting of medicines and the incentive theory and how this can be balanced with access to medicines.
Patenting and Covid-19 Vaccines
Patents have had an important role in organising the collaborations that led to the development and commercialization of COVID-19 vaccines. Patenting is a crucial tool in research-based industries like pharmaceuticals and biologics and can be a means to encourage collaboration. Terms can be negotiated to have different types of expertise combined in one project. The virus will likely garner another sort of PIP-type or any other similar program which will encourage contractual licensing of innovative IP in exchange for access to specialized expertise or important biological data. Monopolisation should clearly be avoided, and patent pooling must be the way forward to obtain sufficient vaccines for Covid-19 as early as possible.
South Africa: Covid Vaccine Manufacturing
To battle COVID-19, the world will need vaccines. Expanding global manufacturing capacity is part of ensuring there are enough to go around. Biovac, based in South Africa, is committed to the long fight against the pandemic. The CEO, Dr Morena Makhoana, estimates that Biovac will be able to produce as many as 30 million doses of a Covid-19 vaccine. Biovac is part-owned by the South African Government. The company is still engaged in talks with global pharmaceutical companies regarding manufacturing and producing Covid-19 vaccines at its facilities in South Africa. The emergence of the second, more lethal variant has added some complexity – and urgency.
How the pandemic catalyzed innovation in health IT, per 8 hospital execs
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated innovation at hospitals across the USA by forcing them to adopt new, digitally focused ways of delivering care, paving the way for further tech-enabled improvements after the pandemic subsides. In this interview, eight hospital and health system innovation leaders weigh in on how healthcare innovation trends have grown amid the pandemic.
The interviewees acknowledge that the pandemic has taken away everyone’s excuses as to why telehealth cannot work and instead made them focus on how and why it must work. Before the pandemic, most traditional brick-and-mortar providers in our industry saw telehealth as a threat and were thus quite biased to focus on its shortcomings. Not surprisingly, they were quick to point out why telehealth was not ideal – or even ‘dangerous’ – for ‘most’ encounters. Payers sang the same tune, as they have always been wary of the potential for unchecked overutilization of telehealth.
Why intellectual property rights are a key, not a curse, for COVID-19 vaccines
The whole world is waiting for the distribution of vaccines against COVID-19 and should be distributed to all adults globally over the next 18 months. Calls are getting louder that intellectual property rights (IPR) should be suspended to allow unfettered vaccine manufacture will mean faster access for developing countries. The head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, gave tacit support this week, warning of a “catastrophic moral failure” caused by unequal access to COVID vaccines. However, IP has played a vital role in every step of vaccine research, manufacturing and distribution. The Pfizer/BioNtech partnership behind the first vaccine to be authorised in the US would not have taken place without strong IP rights.
In a competitive market, no single company will monopolise COVID vaccines or succeed in “profiteering”. A zero IP world would be a backward step and discourage companies from making urgently needed refinements to existing vaccines to combat new COVID-19 variants.
Expectations rise for China-US health cooperation
In their 2021 annual letter themed ‘the year global health went local’ released by Bill Gates and Melinda Gates, they are reviewing the epidemic in 2020 and addressing the future.
Gates stressed that cooperation between China and the US is critical to combating the pandemic, including ending the current pandemic and preventing the next one, while he pointed to China’s continuing technological advances, improving regulatory capabilities and a growing willingness to help the world.
Roberta Lipson, founder of United Family Healthcare, agreed that there is plenty of room for cooperation between China and the US, first and foremost in healthcare amid the epidemic’s hardships. High tariffs make the use of imported products more costly for both countries, said Lipson, adding that elimination or reduction of these duties would give patients in both countries access to the most suitable products at reduced costs.
“Opening the market for leading-edge therapies and medicines will also benefit from level playing fields in central procurement as well as reliable intellectual property rights protection,” said Lipson.
U.S. business leaders believe 5G will aid recovery from economic impact of COVID-19
Verizon Business released findings from its “Verizon 5G Business Report” highlighting the impact 5G technology is expected to have across the United States. The report revealed that technology decision-makers overwhelmingly agree 5G high-speed communications networks and devices will create new growth opportunities and applications for their companies and industries within the next two years.
The survey, which was conducted in partnership with Morning Consult, polled 700 business technology decision-makers across the United States to gauge interest in deploying 5G and specific use cases within the Sports/Entertainment/Media, Government/Public Sector, Healthcare, Manufacturing, and Retail.
Decision-makers largely agree that 5G will create new opportunities for their company (80%), their industry (79%), and their role (79%). According to the survey, 5G will also play an important role to help economic recovery: Seven in 10 (69%) decision-makers believe 5G will help their company overcome the negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Why intellectual property rights matter for COVID-19
Ending the COVID-19 pandemic requires innovation. IP is part of the solution and drives competition. IP licensing allows the innovator to control which partners manufacture the product, ensuring high quality supplies, and to maximise low-cost access for low and middle-income countries. Philip Stevens and Mark Schultz show that the reality is different from what calls for the suspension of IPRs suggest in order to keep prices low and address supply shortages. A highly competitive market in COVID-19 vaccines is unfolding right now. There is no evidence that abolishing IPRs will achieve anything more than the licensing agreements currently in place between innovators and big-name vaccine manufacturers in countries like India and Brazil; and the emergence of procurement mechanisms like COVAX. The authors demonstrate how the IP system has put us in a position to end the pandemic and why we should allow it to continue doing its job.
If poor countries go unvaccinated, rich ones will pay, a study shows.
Ensuring that every country gets enough vaccines against COVID-19 should not only be done for humanitarian reasons: It is also of economic interest, says a study commissioned by the International Chamber of Commerce. If less prosperous countries do not receive sufficient vaccinations, the rich countries will have to bear the (economic) costs.
In the worst-case scenario: If wealthy countries are fully vaccinated by the middle of this year and poor countries are largely excluded – the global economy would suffer losses of more than $9 trillion, a sum greater than the annual output of Japan and Germany combined.
Even if researchers do not expect the worst and assume that developing countries vaccinate half the population by the end of 2021, the global economy would take a hit of between $1.8 trillion and $3.8 trillion.