The United States appears to be at a real turning point in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic. Even as cases remain inexcusably high, and many states have prematurely relaxed commonsense mask and social distancing restrictions, the pace of vaccinations is accelerating, with President Biden calling on states to make inoculations available to all adults by May 1.
But with a pandemic that has spread around the entire world, an excessive focus on our country’s fortunes threatens to be deeply counterproductive. After all, most people are now aware that the longer the virus rages around the world, the better the chances that it will mutate into variants against which current vaccines are less effective. Stopping the virus at home means stopping it overseas.
Depressingly, though, much of the world remains unvaccinated, with the dominant theme being a grotesque inequality between wealthier countries and others; according to The New York Times, “Residents of wealthy and middle-income countries have received about 90 percent of the nearly 400 million vaccines delivered so far. Under current projections, many of the rest will have to wait years.”
As that startling Times piece goes on to describe, there’s a key reason for this disparity, and for the horrifying prospect that it might be years before poorer nations and populations receive vaccines: it turns out that much of the developed world chose not to include language in vaccine contracts that would have forced pharmaceutical companies to share vaccine know-how with companies and governments seeking to vaccinate poorer countries. One might have expected the Trump administration to display such indifference; but even less morally-compromised European countries followed the same contractual path. Something went terribly wrong across many nations, for reasons that beg a deeper look.
Fortunately for the sake of continued government leverage in the United States, many of the current coronavirus vaccines employ biotechnology that depends on a patent the U.S. government is about to receive; this patent will allow our government not only to make money licensing the technology to the companies already using it, but will also present an opportunity to pressure them into sharing their vaccine formulations with poorer nations. Incredibly, though, it appears that there’s hesitancy within the Biden administration about how much pressure to exert. The conflict seems to come down to balancing the monetary incentives for pharmaceutical companies to continue taking risks in developing vaccines against the basic need to vaccinate people.
But there can’t be any question that the U.S. government must strike this balance in a way that results in cheap, readily-available vaccines for the rest of the world as soon as humanly possible. To do otherwise subverts a central purpose of patents; they’re not only intended to spur innovation by offering financial protections to inventors, but particularly in the case of vaccines, their obvious goal is to benefit society. In the case of a deadly pandemic that has already crippled societies and economies, tilting the balance in favor of protecting health seems overwhelmingly correct on both moral and pragmatic grounds. Losing hundreds of thousands or even millions more lives so that rich and powerful biotech companies supposedly remain incentivized to innovate is a moral tradeoff no civilized society or world should even be contemplating. If our system of vaccine development requires thousands to die in order for it to function, then the system is contemptible and broken.
The worries about undermining innovation and incentives to develop vaccines become even more tenuous when you step back and contemplate that it was the U.S. government’s willingness to backstop vaccine research, and provide research it had itself developed, that made the rapid development of coronavirus vaccines by corporations possible in the first place. In other words, we’ve already recognized that this pandemic is a situation where it’s insufficient to rely on market mechanisms to incentivize vaccine development. Having applied an approach of strong government intervention — an intervention grounded in the expenditure of taxpayer dollars — you can’t then turn around and try to argue that we’re now in a situation where the government will somehow destroy all future incentives for innovation by pressuring pharmaceutical companies to share their technologies. That is an unacceptable, immoral argument, and I hope to god it’s not one that the Biden administration intends to make. I also wonder if the hesitation is not simply coming from the government, but from companies eager to protect their profits at any cost, even as those profits are based on funds and research provided courtesy of the American people. (As a side note, I have yet to hear about a single pharmaceutical company rejecting government assistance on the principle that it improperly undermined their incentive to develop vaccines).
And as historian Timothy Snyder argues, the case for the United States making vaccines available to poorer nations is overwhelming simply in terms of basic self-interest; the gains he describes greatly overshadow exaggerated concerns that pressuring pharmaceutical companies might somehow hurt future vaccine development. As Snyder describes matters, the pandemic and its fallout is the most pressing issue of our time, and the United States can reap immense diplomatic and other soft power benefits by acting as a vaccine distributor to the world. Such benefits would be on top of the essential need to stop further mutations that undermine an effective vaccine regimen within U.S. borders, and to ensure the world economy does not continue to be suppressed by the pandemic.
Snyder notes the small cost of contributing to vaccination efforts in comparison to U.S. military spending, which hints at another argument that he doesn’t fully explore: placing public health concerns at the center of U.S. diplomatic efforts could be a way to roll back and rectify decades of a counterproductively militarized American foreign policy. And protecting global health has more than a passing commonality with the overwhelming existential challenge of our time: stopping climate change as quickly as we can. Demonstrating leadership through a massive global public health initiative could also help supercharge the cause of U.S. leadership on global climate change efforts.
Intriguingly, Snyder ties a U.S. vaccine initiative to our ability to protect democracies as they remain under assault from authoritarian leaders and parties around the world. By providing assistance not only to poorer nations, but also to our European allies as they fumble through vaccine issues, the U.S. has a chance of gaining major good will with millions of ordinary Europeans, and providing persuasive evidence of the effectiveness of democratic governance in those countries that cooperate with American assistance. As Snyder summarizes, “The United States has a once-in-a-century chance to do well by doing right.”