Not So ’IP ’IP Hooray At All

Context: The intellectual property waiver for vaccines alone is unlikely to boost supplies for India

Background

• Recently, the US administration agreed to support the waiver of intellectual property (IP) for Covid-19 vaccines in a bid to control and end the pandemic.
  • This is in response to a joint proposal put forth by India and South Africa at WTO to suspend IP rights for all Covid-related technologies under the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs).

Concerns with the announcement of IP waiver by the US:

• Limited to vaccines: Considered waiver of IP only on Covid vaccines rather than all Covid-related technologies, including diagnostics and treatments such as remdesivir.
• Unlikely to boost vaccine supply: Because of the following 3 reasons –
  • IP was never a barrier to access Covid vaccines technology because out of the eight Covid vaccines approved in various countries; five are already licensed or produced in India.
    • AstraZeneca, Novavax, Johnson & Johnson and Gamaleya Institute- Russian Direct Investment Fund have been licensed for manufacture to Indian companies such as Serum Institute of India (SII), Biological E, Dr Reddy’s and Hetero.
  • Difficult to reverse engineer: A waiver under TRIPs does not compel any of the patent-owning vaccine manufacturers to actively share their ‘knowhow’, like cell lines.
    • Unlike small-molecule drugs, vaccines are exceptionally difficult to reverse engineer without the ‘knowhow’ and trade secrets being actively shared by the inventor company.
  • Challenges in scaling up: This depends on access to material inputs, cheap capital and availability of time and expertise to set up high-end production facilities.
    • For e.g. when the Indian government directed the state-owned Haffkine Institute to manufacture Covaxin, the institute claimed it would take it close to a year to get the vaccines out, as it currently does not possess the required Biosafety Level-3 quality-controlled production facilities to manufacture the vaccine.

Conclusion: Need of the hour is making the right investments in Indian companies to enable scale-up of capacity.