Posts Tagged: "COVID-19"

At today’s Heritage Foundation event in Washington, D.C., titled Restoring American Leadership in Patent Law and Innovation Policy, former U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Director (USPTO) Andrei Iancu began by lamenting the failure of decision makers to make the connection between intellectual property and innovation. Increasingly, policy makers think innovation just happens, Iancu explained, with too many believing monetization happens after the fact, rather than driving innovation. “Without IP, the free market does not participate, or does not participate to scale,” Iancu told the Heritage audience. Laurie Self, Senior Vice President and Counsel, Government Affairs, Qualcomm, agreed with Iancu and added that, without a strong patent system, there is no opportunity to maintain a strong innovation leadership position. Presumably alluding to developments such as the Biden Administration’s support for waiving IP rights under the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) related to COVID-19 inventions and the recent Executive Order on Competition, Self said: “We are seeing a series of policies that if implemented would undermine our system… this cognitive dissonance is a threat.”

One-hundred-twenty-four professors and academics from around the world have penned an open letter supporting India and South Africa’s proposed waiver of certain provisions of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement), which they claim will help to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. According to a press release about the letter, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, Brazil, Japan, Norway, Switzerland and the EU continue to oppose the waiver proposal. The United States expressed its support for waiver in May. Over the last several weeks, Europe has doubled down on its opposition to the proposal in ongoing talks.

With summer underway in the United States, we want to believe the global pandemic is ending. In many cities, restaurants are at near-full capacity, scaled-back festivals are taking place, and companies are preparing to gradually welcome workers back into the office. Meanwhile, other cities around the world haven’t been as lucky. Flashpoints across India continue to fuel that country’s spike in COVID-19 cases while residents of Tokyo, with their low vaccination rates, nervously await the Summer Olympic Games this August. The African continent is experiencing a multi-variant and potentially devastating resurgence of cases.

While countless industries have been forced to adapt to the COVID-19 pandemic, the video game industry has been on a winning streak. Historic numbers of people have turned to video games for social connection, competitive sport, and everything in between. By the numbers, one in three people on the planet play video games and, this week, millions of those people tuned into E3, the premiere event for game players and game creators alike.

Waiving intellectual property (IP) protections for COVID-19 vaccines will hinder rather than further three meritorious objectives of the current U.S. Presidential Administration: ending the pandemic as soon as possible, leveling the IP playing field with China, and pursuing a worker-centric trade policy. Ensuring equitable, widespread, and successful distribution of vaccines across the globe to meet the challenges of COVID-19, ending the erosion of U.S. IP at the hands of China, and putting Americans back to work are goals that most of us in the U.S. share. An examination of the facts, however, demonstrates that waiving IP rights in the name of COVID-19 relief undermines each of these three U.S. government goals.

On June 4, the European Commission submitted to the World Trade Organization (WTO) its proposal for improving access to COVID-19 vaccines and treatments in countries suffering from vaccine shortages. The plan was submitted as an alternative to other proposals that would eliminate international patent rights for COVID-19 vaccines and treatments under the premise that such action would improve vaccine access in poorer countries. While the EU alternative contemplates the possible use of compulsory licensing, it addresses supply chain issues that will help to inoculate the entire globe against COVID-19 much more quickly than any patent waiver could ever hope to accomplish.

Intellectual property (IP) made modern vaccines possible. It took billions of dollars in private and public investments in research and development to be able to create, in record time, multiple viable vaccines to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. The entire world should be celebrating the innovators that continue to push forward with new solutions to problems we will face in the future. This pandemic will end, but there will be another. We should be eternally grateful to have companies like Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson that have the capability to create and manufacture vaccines at large scale…. It has been over four months since President Biden’s inauguration. As of yet there has not been a nomination for the Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). In addition to running the USPTO, the Director is responsible for advising the President on intellectual property issues. I believe that President Biden would have benefitted from an experienced voice knowledgeable about the dangers of supporting the erosion of property rights during the discussions on whether to support India and South Africa’s proposal to the World Trade Organization to waive IP protections under the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS).

Cybercriminals have exploited the COVID-19 pandemic and the disruption of the past 14 months to scam a record number of people. The UK’s cybersecurity agency, the National Cyber Security Centre, has recently confirmed that it has taken down more scams in the last year than in the previous three years combined. In addition, experts oversaw a 15-fold rise in the removal of online campaigns when compared with 2019. Disturbingly, cybercriminals have also incorporated the COVID-19 pandemic and the vaccine rollout into their scams. The National Cyber Security Centre found a jump in the number of fraudsters using National Health Service (NHS) branding to dupe victims in the UK, with the vaccine rollout being used to acquire people’s personal information. 

While the discussions around waiving intellectual property (IP) rights set forth in the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) are currently (and somewhat amorphously) limited to COVID-19 related drug and medical products, it is probably shortsighted to ignore the implications for other technologies critical to sustaining our environment and advancing a more healthful world. In fact, if we want to ensure continued investment in these technologies, we should be very concerned about the message conveyed by the international political tide: if you overcome a challenging scientific problem and your solution has the potential to save lives, be prepared to be subjected to intense political pressure and to potentially hand over your technology without compensation and regardless of the consequences.

All the fuss surrounding the proposal by India and South Africa to suspend the TRIPS Agreement to help them produce vaccines to fight COVID-19 has obscured some critical truths. In spite of the rallying cry “Patents versus People,” it’s not really about patents. And merely lifting TRIPS obligations will do nothing to address the current suffering of the world’s poorer populations. In fact, it would hamper efforts to secure global distribution of vaccines, as well as cause real harm in the long term.

A group of 16 Republican senators sent a letter on Wednesday to U.S. Department of Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) Katherine Tai denouncing the Biden Administration’s “disastrous decision” to support a proposal at the World Trade Organization (WTO) to waive intellectual property (IP) rights for COVID-19-related inventions and products.  The letter explains that the waiver is not limited to vaccines and “will do nothing to end the pandemic,” but will instead “undermine the extraordinary global response that has achieved historically remarkable results in record time and our nation’s global leadership in the technologies, medicines, and treatments of the future.”

A decade of consecutive, annual growth in patent application activity worldwide came to a sudden halt in 2020. The pandemic has upended many aspects of business, including patent activity. Filings at the European Patent Office (EPO) may have dipped just 0.7% last year but findings from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) revealed a 3% drop in filings globally. While broad insights can be extracted from analyzing patent filing activity, as revealed by the EPO’s latest Patent Index, increasingly, organizations are looking for more. With the complexities of today’s business environment exacerbated by the pandemic, businesses seek deeper intelligence and the ability to connect different data points that can translate into actionable insights that support faster, better decisions.

President Biden recently announced his support for easing patent rules surrounding COVID-19 vaccines and other COVID-related intellectual property in the wake of growing crises in India and South Africa. Despite President Biden’s public support, easing the international patent rules requires a unanimous decision on the part of the World Trade Organization (WTO), which is still uncertain. However, with the United States’ announcement, the European Union (EU) will also reportedly consider the issue. Predictably, major pharmaceutical companies, including the three pharmaceutical manufacturers with vaccines approved for use in the United States — Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson —have lobbied against easing patent rules. But, given the uniquely global reach of the pandemic and the practical barriers to the production and distribution of vaccines on a global scale, it would be a mistake not to provide patent infringement waivers. What is the need? What is the legal issue? And will it make a difference?

The implications of the announcement that the Biden Administration will support efforts to waive intellectual property protection for COVID-19 vaccines and therapies is still sinking in. The Wall Street Journal wrote two editorials in three days, the second more blistering than the first. “Biden’s Vaccine IP Debacle” begins: “… [T]his may be the single worst presidential economic decision since Nixon’s wage-and-price controls.” Not to second guess the paper, but President Nixon’s decision only harmed our economy—this one threatens both our economy and our health far into the future.

The petition by South Africa and India at the World Trade Organization (WTO) to waive most of the protections in the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement was all but dead. It failed in October, December, January, March, and May. Then, after the Biden Administration expressed in the most neutral terms is was “considering” and “discussing” the proposal, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai yesterday announced U.S. support for text-based negotiations that “will take some time.” IP rights are not the barrier to rapid production of vaccines advocates think they are, the waiver would cause more harm than possible good. The WTO would do much better to discuss removing obstacles to the trade of COVID-19 related items than removing intellectual property rights. There are 191 trade restriction measures on COVID-19 related supplies.