Now that a number of pharmaceutical companies have found what seems to be a potential long-term or at least some kind of a solution to the COVID-19 pandemic, a new problem has arisen – distribution.
Many people questioned the logistic of the distribution well before the vaccines were found, but as it wasn't an acute problem at that time, I don't think it was efficiently addressed.
Last week I partook in a large open webinar on COVID-19 vaccination. It was organized for journalists from all over the world by the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas in partnership with UNESCO and the World Health Organization and funding from the European Union. In many senses, it was an eye-opener.
Some participating experts brought up their concerns about inefficient vaccine delivery in some countries like France, with tens of thousands of doses administered a day where potentially hundreds if not millions could have been delivered, as they do have the supplies or capacities to produce such quantities.
At the same time, a participant from Latin America pointed out that most countries on the continent hardly received any doses from suppliers, and with just a few thousand doses delivered the speed of immunization is out of the question so far.
Canada is still in its second month of COVID-19 vaccination, but the concern of potential vaccine shortages has been making headlines for a few weeks now. And that's a developed country that actually has resources to secure the needed amount of vaccine.Â
A lot of other important questions were brought up and are to be answered sooner or later. Acute issues, such as logistics, production, distribution, communication with the population, the information on vaccines themselves and skepticism about vaccination as a process, are more or less pronounced in different countries, yet exist everywhere. There was one particular idea pointed out by Yves Sciama, a French science journalist, that caught my attention. He switched the focus to intellectual property (definitely not the first one that comes to mind, right? I'll explain in a moment.)
The chaotic situation with the vaccine delivery is something that was expected. A while ago I thought that whoever would come up with the vaccine would have to be wiser than Solomon to find the perfect solution as to the best and smartest way to distribute the dosages across the world.
Unfortunately, we are not perfect, so are our solutions, especially when there are so many variables. Profits, patriotism in a sense of putting own population first, political atmosphere, future outcomes of any decision, all these and other factors affect the choices different countries make trying to control the vaccine distribution. But there is one thing that is in the essence of the problem – currently, the vaccine is limited. There are only that many doses available every day. And even with new companies announcing their successes in the development and approval of new product, we are way, way too far from having enough vaccine to sufficiently immunize the world population.
We can't get out of the pandemic one country at a time. So, we need to make sure that we are marching in step. But for that, we need to be able to produce way more vaccine than we are. There is progress in this area, but we still don't know how long the vaccine will last and when or if we'll need to reimmunize. If we do, then the production capacity becomes totally vital.
So here is the question that stumped me. Is it possible in the current unprecedented situation to change the intellectual property rights system we are living in for the sake of all people and to share the existing proven formulas to save time on research and thus save potentially thousands or millions of lives?
On the one hand, the existing system has been helping the creators, be it companies or individuals, to be rewarded for their work for years. On the other hand, this change would allow pharmaceutical giants to co-operate and probably get way further than where they all are individually. However, in that co-operation, some of them will lose, while others will gain. Besides, the precedent may destroy the system, leaving many inventors, especially of smaller scale, vulnerable and discouraged from further progress.
To me, the idea of taking something from those who have it and sharing it with everybody else also brings up bad associations, as it mimics one of the main postulates that brought Bolsheviks to power in 1917 and soon led to a disastrous civil war. And the memories of the aftermath of the fierce and forced implementation of that idea are worrisome.Â
However, the situation with the vaccine is very different. The position we are in now suggests that unless we find a way to speed up the process, we may soon see something ugly happening, as the burnout from "temporary lockdowns" of different scales across the world along with economic instability is heating up the atmosphere better than any kind of gases. (And the Doomsday Clock, the symbol representing the likelihood of a man-made global catastrophe, is 100 seconds from midnight, as close as they've ever been).
So can the change in the patent system improve the situation? I'd say, yes. Is it possible? Not so sure, but it is something to think about.
