Waiving IP for Vaccines – Or Actually Doing Good

The Biden administration has, perhaps not surprisingly, agreed to support a temporary waiver of intellectual property rights for Covid-19 vaccines.  It sounds good on the surface, but I can’t help but wonder if the better solution might be to just pay Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna to make as many doses as they can as quickly as they can.  They know how to make these vaccines.  They have the best idea on how to ramp up production.  Instead of giving away IP to people and companies who may or may not know how to make these vaccines, why not just buy more doses from the people who do know how to make them. 

The United States could volunteer to pay the costs.¹  The total cost would probably disappear in the rounding with all of the programs the Biden administration is already proposing.  And giving away vaccines would be a great foreign policy move.  Russia can’t afford to do it, and China doesn’t have vaccines that work as well as these.  But we do can it.  We can help the world.  And that’s something you do when you can.

The only real problem I can see is that “big pharma” might make some money doing it this way.  On the other hand, “big pharma” is the one who got these vaccines done so fast in the first place.  If they make some money, it’s minor compared to the money the economy can save and the suffering we can help avoid by getting this done as quickly as possible.² 

The choice may boil down to: (i) vaccines as quickly as possible with money going to big pharma to do it; or (ii) cutting out big pharma and getting vaccines to people whenever companies who aren’t making them now figure out how to make in the future.  One may save more lives sooner.  The other will definitely give less money to big pharma.  In other words, a choice between what works and what feels good?
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¹ We could ask other really rich countries to chip in, too.
² I also like the idea of making sure big pharma is motivated to get those boosters coming.