On March 17th 2020, the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer officially partnered with Biopharmaceutical New Technologies (BioNTech), a spinoff of the Johannes Gutenberg-University of Mainz. The partnership was to accelerate a potential first-in-class Covid-19 vaccine (BNT162), using not attenuated or deactivated virus but a strand of messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) to produce, and engender immunity against, the virus’ spike protein.
On March 17th 2020, the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer officially partnered with Biopharmaceutical New Technologies (BioNTech), a spinoff of the Johannes Gutenberg-University of Mainz. The partnership was to accelerate a potential first-in-class Covid-19 vaccine (BNT162), using not attenuated or deactivated virus but a strand of messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) to produce, and engender immunity against, the virus’ spike protein.
The vaccine was expected to enter clinical testing by the end of the following month. At that point, it had already been almost entirely developed by the small German immunotherapy company. What Pfizer brought to the alliance was essentially funds for the clinical trials and commercial capabilities.
Pfizer, along with the rest of the industry, has been lobbying to stop a temporary waiver of IPR, endorsed by the current US administration under Joe Biden, to allow generic Covid-19 vaccines to be distributed at low cost in the global south. Instead, the industry is asserting monopoly rights in all those developing economies that ratified the agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), which came into force back in 1995—even at the cost of delaying Covid-19 immunisation worldwide.
Patenting vaccines (and drugs) is particularly problematic, since public research irrigation is preponderant and large companies typically come into play only in the phase of clinical trials, right before patenting, usually when the resources to be invested exceed the financial capacities of small inventors. The pricing of the patented products, however, does not internalise the contribution by other actors, including public institutions, or public-health objectives (such as global immunisation in the case of Covid-19), since the IPR system has not been designed to do so. On the contrary, being subject to intense lobbying and regulatory capture by large companies, the system is often abused and high prices persist, granting to the privileged holders profits not justifiable by their contribution.
This is as socially inequitable as it is economically inefficient—its inadequacy dramatically exposed by the pandemic. Vaccines developed with substantial public contributions are generating hundreds of billions of dollars in sales for the pharmaceutical companies, while the coronavirus is still ravaging poorer nations which cannot afford immunisation.
The vaccine was expected to enter clinical testing by the end of the following month. At that point, it had already been almost entirely developed by the small German immunotherapy company. What Pfizer brought to the alliance was essentially funds for the clinical trials and commercial capabilities.
This is as socially inequitable as it is economically inefficient—its inadequacy dramatically exposed by the pandemic. Vaccines developed with substantial public contributions are generating hundreds of billions of dollars in sales for the pharmaceutical companies, while the coronavirus is still ravaging poorer nations which cannot afford immunisation.
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Fighting Covid-19 requires fewer patents and more state – Piergiuseppe Fortunato
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