While nations are competing to create vaccine to prevent a crisis, intellectual property regimes should not outweigh public interests. Comment (200 Words)
Refer - Business Standard
Enrich the answer from other sources, if the question demands.
IAS Parliament 5 years
KEY POINTS
· The global pharmaceutical industry is racing to create a vaccine for coronavirus and the winning companies are certain to generate billions of dollars in revenue and wealth for shareholders.
· But the bigger concern once the vaccines enter the market is balancing intellectual property (IP) regimes with public health interests.
· Current IP regimes, which enable Big Pharma monopolies to extract large profits from consumers, are unnecessary and they make the case for the benefits of “open science” instead.
· This global not-for-profit, knowledge-sharing architecture for the flu vaccines has been around for 50 years and could be a useful template in the quest for the coronavirus vaccine.
· Profits are hardwired into vaccines since they need to be administered almost universally (such as the triple antigen), so that monopolies and quasi-monopolies can extract billions of dollars from public health budgets.
· India has experienced the benefits of freely available vaccines such as those for kala azar, polio, and smallpox to eliminate these diseases.
· The government has a range of policy options and tools at its disposal to ensure that the coronavirus vaccine is widely and cheaply (or freely) available. The country has already decided to speed up vaccine trials (six firms are in the fray) and the government can deploy the TRIPs-compliant tool of compulsory licensing to enable the vaccine to be produced by third-party manufacturers at affordable prices.
· It could strengthen these initiatives by passing legislation to, say, reduce the patent period for vaccines, since the development and testing schedule for vaccines is a fraction of the time it takes for a regular new drug to be developed and tested.
