wanted to produce<\/a>\u00a0the Pfizer vaccine by converting existing facilities, but was unable to come to an agreement.<\/p>\nThe problems with increasing production of vaccines, treatments, and tests goes beyond just patents. A couple of months ago, I was on a panel with an industry representative who was anxious to boast that much of the technology needed to produce the mRNA vaccines does not depend on patent monopolies, but is instead held as industrial secrets. He said that he didn\u2019t see how companies could be forced to disclose secret information.<\/p>\n
Of course, no company has to disclose secret information \u2014 we can just have their top engineers share the expertise they have gained while at Pfizer, AstraZeneca, or Moderna. Surely, for paychecks of millions of dollars per month, many of the most the most knowledgeable engineers at these companies could be persuaded to share their know-how with pharmaceutical manufacturers in the developing world. The fact that they could also be helping to save millions of lives might also make this work attractive.<\/p>\n
The reason this technology transfer is not happening now is that all these companies have non-disclosure agreements with the employees who would have access to this knowledge. If any of them were to begin sharing information with another pharmaceutical company, they would certainly face a large lawsuit from their former employer, who may also be able to get an injunction prohibiting this engineer from providing further assistance. If an engineer were to act in violation of an injunction, they could face imprisonment. In short, the laws on non-disclosure agreements can be used by pharmaceutical companies to block the transfer of the technologies needed to effectively combat the pandemic.<\/p>\n
Governments do not have to make non-disclosure agreements enforceable contracts, especially when so much of the underlying technology, as in the case of mRNA vaccines, was developed with public funds.\u00a0 Non-disclosure agreements are quite explicitly designed to limit competition. Other contracts designed to restrict competition are not enforceable by the courts. For example, if Apple were to pay Samsung $1 billion in exchange for a commitment not to charge less than $800 for its newest smart phone, no court would sanction Samsung if it violated this agreement. Since the purpose is clearly to limit competition, in direct violation of antitrust laws, this sort of contract would be unenforceable.<\/p>\n
In the same vein, we can think of the laws on non-disclosure agreements as efforts to limit competition that have no place in a free market. Again, the case for this view is strongest when much of the funding for the development of technology comes from the government, as is the case with the COVID-19 vaccines and most innovations in the biomedical sector.<\/p>\n
The proponents of the World Trade Organization (WTO) often talk about it as promoting free trade, but in fact, the TRIPS accord went 180 degrees in the opposite direction. TRIPS is about bottling up technology. A WTO that was actually designed to promote free trade and the transfer of technology would, instead of protecting patent monopolies, be banning, or least severely restricting, non-disclosure agreements. Don\u2019t look for that one any time soon.<\/p>\n
\u201cFree trade\u201d has always been a flexible concept that the wealthy and powerful have interpreted in ways that advance their interests at the expense of everyone else. The Opium Wars fought between China and the United Kingdom were justified on the basis of free trade. The UK was insisting that people in China had the right to buy opium, which was the one product that it could sell to China in large quantities in order to pay for all the items it wanted to buy from China.<\/p>\n
We should think about current rules on intellectual property in the same way. They have no moral or economic rationale. (Yeah, I know we can tell stories about how they are needed for innovation, but they aren\u2019t true.) The laws on intellectual property are designed to make a relatively small number of people very rich. In doing so, they not only make everyone else poorer, but they also cost millions or even tens of millions of lives.<\/p>\n\n \n \n \n\n \n
\n \n\n\nThis post was originally published on Jacobin<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Now that George W. Bush is back in the news with his attacks on Trumpist insurrectionists, it might be worth reviving one of the great lines of his presidency. After the September 11 attack, when Bush decided to go after not just the terrorists who planned the hijackings, but all sorts of people around the [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":120,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318575"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/120"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=318575"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318575\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":318576,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318575\/revisions\/318576"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=318575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=318575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=318575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}