THE BIG SECRET BEHIND THE PROPOSED TRIPS WAIVER:

So, this is why a temporary waiver of TRIPS—which would suspend national obligations to enforce IP rights—can’t possibly help countries like India get more vaccines to its citizens. The know-how required to manufacture at scale is owned by the companies like Pfizer and Moderna that are producing doses in record volumes. To effect the demanded “technology transfer,” governments would have to secure the agreement of those companies not just to hand over their entire “cookbook” but also to send qualified scientists and technicians to spend time at the foreign facilities, basically consulting on how to implement the secret processes to produce a safe vaccine. And even if that transfer happened tomorrow, getting to the point of actually manufacturing in volume would take more than a year.

Not only would the TRIPS waiver not produce the results the proponents want, it would likely reduce the current level of international distribution of vaccines, by interfering with access to the limited supplies of required ingredients. In fact, this supply chain disruption was recently cited by none other than the government of India in pushing back against popular demands for a compulsory license on Gilead’s Remdesivir and other COVID-19 treatments, noting that the “main constraint” was not intellectual property rights but preventing competition for scarce “raw materials and other essential inputs.”

Related: Don’t Strip Intellectual-Property Rights from Vaccine-Makers.