On Wednesday, the Biden administration came out in support of WTO proposals to temporarily lift intellectual property protections for Covid-19 vaccines. World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus described the U.S. move as "a historic decision" and "a monumental moment in the fight against Covid-19". Originally proposesd by India and South Africa, the plan could boost vaccine production around the world and Biden has come under increasing production to support it. Given that it would allow drugmakers to access closely guarded secrets about how vaccines are produced, pharmaceutical companies have voiced their opposition, claiming the plan will not eliminate supply bottlenecks and only stifle innovation.
Along with the pharmaceutical sector, President Trump was long opposed to a patent waiver, along with the UK and the EU. The debate has moved quickly in recent weeks, however, given the emergence of new variants of Covid-19 in infection hotspots that could prove more resistant to vaccines, possibly prolonging the pandemic. Proponents of the vaccine waiver have consistently pointed out that most Covid-19 vaccine producers would not have developed their jabs as quickly without substantial injections of public R&D funding. According to data compiled by the Knowledge Portal on Innovation and Access to Medicines, hundreds of millions of dollars have flowed into the companies that developed the successful vaccines.
The U.S. and Germany have been the largest Covid-19 vaccine R&D investors, putting $2 billion and $1.5 billion into the effort, respectively. In total, some $5.9 billion of investment was tracked up to March 2021 and the vast majority of it, 98.12 percent, was public funding. Private companies received most of the funding with more than $900 million going to both Moderna and Janssen while $800 million went to Pfizer/BioNTech. Nearly all of the R&D money invested in all three companies came from public funding. Shares in Moderna, BioNTech and other vaccine producers dropped sharply when news of U.S. support for a patent waiver emerged on Wednesday.
