Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders called for prominent U.S. drug companies to surrender their intellectual property rights to “allow other countries” to produce and distribute vaccinations more expediently.
Maintaining intellectual property rights is “morally objectionable” because “rich countries” maintain stockpiles of the shots, while those in “poor countries” cannot keep up, Sanders said on Sunday.
“The second thing we should do is … we should deal with this issue through the World Trade Organization of protecting the intellectual property rights of the drug companies,” he told NBC News’s Chuck Todd. “I think what we have got to say right now to the drug companies, when millions of lives are at stake around the world — allow other countries to have these intellectual property rights so that they can produce the vaccines that are desperately needed in poor countries.”
WHEN WE GET A VACCINE, THANK INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS
He continued: “There is something morally objectionable about rich countries being able to get that vaccine, and yet millions and billions of people in poor countries are unable to afford it.”
Critics of intellectual property protections for pharmaceutical giants insist that divesting the rights would “mobilize additional manufacturers and help address vaccine access disparities,” according to the Center for Global Development. However, proponents of leaving the intellectual property protections alone contend that there aren’t additional manufacturers who would be able or willing to produce the vaccinations up to par.
In March, CEOs from Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and a handful of other medical corporations wrote a letter to President Joe Biden, urging him to allow companies to retain intellectual property rights, as not doing so would lead to “confusion” and a “barrier to information sharing.” Such a move “would not speed up production,” the pharmaceutical giants said.
“Intellectual property protections have been essential not only to speed the research and development of new treatments and vaccines, but also to facilitate sharing of technology and information to scale up vaccine manufacturing to meet global needs,” the group of companies wrote at the time. “Eliminating those protections would undermine the global response to the pandemic, including ongoing effort to tackle new variants, create confusion that could potentially undermine public confidence in vaccine safety, and create a barrier to information sharing. Most importantly, eliminating protections would not speed up production.”
Sanders expressed support for transferring large quantities of shots to other countries as the pandemic worsens in areas such as India.
“We have got to make sure that every American gets vaccinated as quickly as possible, but I do think, not only do we have a moral responsibility to help the rest of the world, it’s in our own self-interest. Because if this pandemic continues to spread in other countries, it’s going to come back and bite us at one point or another.”
Biden, in his first congressional address Wednesday, appeared to share the liberal senator’s vision.
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“There’s no wall high enough to keep any virus out. And our own vaccine supply, as it grows to meet our needs, and we’re meeting them, will become an arsenal of vaccines for other countries, just as America was the arsenal of democracy for the world and in consequence, influenced the world,” he said.
The United States has administered 243,463,471 vaccine doses of 312,508,205 that have been distributed, according to the CDC.
