Patent benefits

Why should patentees waive the rights they are fully entitled to in inventions made by them and developed at huge cost? (“Why won’t big pharma share their vaccine patents?” Prospect podcast.) If that R&D has been funded to a significant extent by third-party finance, whether private or government, then those funders could and should have stipulated conditions they wanted to apply to the commercial products that resulted, just as the Oxford scientists did in their deal with AstraZeneca.

If they failed to do that in the case of the Covid vaccines, that is no reason to overturn the whole rationale of the patent system, which is to encourage inventors to publish the detail of their inventions to allow others to reproduce them, in return for a limited period of monopoly over their commercialisation.

Richard Burnett-Hall, via the website