11–19 of 19 posts
Garbage take. No one with even half a clue thought that Moderna pledging not to enforce patents meant that they would just give away their IP. And what’s missing in this unhinged rant is any nuance about how to allow for generic drugs whilst still ensuring pharmaceutical companies can afford to invest in increasingly expensive bets.
Garbage take. No one with even half a clue thought that Moderna pledging not to enforce patents meant that they would just give away their IP. And what’s missing in this unhinged rant is any nuance about how to allow for generic drugs whilst still ensuring pharmaceutical companies can afford to invest in increasingly expensive bets.
It's Jacobin Magazine. Putting complicated news stories into a procrustean oversimplification that produces a socialism/capitalism manichean duality is a substantial part of their reporting. I suggest not taking it too seriously;it's just what they do.
Truthfully that takes a degree of skill and it even has utility but as you say - it's best to see it for what it is.
No, it's not. The article argues that patents are irrelevant, since the know-how of drug manufacturing is the only thing that really matters. This would definitely be news to the drug companies, who spend fortunes depending their patents. And yes, of course know-how matters, but forgoing patent litigation removes at least one obstacle for competitors and it's a charitable thing for Moderna to do. In this particular i…
Despite the title this blog post seems to be more about the unfortunate trade that "the commons" did with private inventors: originally patents were meant as an alternative to trade secrets - you revealed the trade secret to the public, and in exchange you got 20 years of exclusive use of said (no-longer-)secret. But now we've got the worts of both worlds: companies patent an essential part of their process to gain e…
Garbage take. No one with even half a clue thought that Moderna pledging not to enforce patents meant that they would just give away their IP. And what’s missing in this unhinged rant is any nuance about how to allow for generic drugs whilst still ensuring pharmaceutical companies can afford to invest in increasingly expensive bets.
Sure but then why make the pledge in the first place?
No, it's not. The article argues that patents are irrelevant, since the know-how of drug manufacturing is the only thing that really matters. This would definitely be news to the drug companies, who spend fortunes depending their patents. And yes, of course know-how matters, but forgoing patent litigation removes at least one obstacle for competitors and it's a charitable thing for Moderna to do. In this particular i…
To put it into perspective, the price they charge per dose is 10% of monthly minimum wage here.
As from my perspective (EU-based, so maybe not comparable) I’d happily give up more than 10% of my monthly salary just to stand a chance of getting a vaccination this quarter.
(I fully appreciate that it’s easy to say this when you are in a wealthy nation and have a lot more disposable income than many people in the world… but I guess what I’m saying is for such a unique and important situation as the pandemic, it’s probably not an unreasonable price to pay.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not that I agree, because I don't, but I think the Jacobin position would be that government banks would bankroll the pharmaceutical co-ops who would freely share the process once it worked.
But then we get nationalism and politics permanently intertwined with medicine. As we’ve seen with the US and EU during COVID are exports and recipe sharing going to be banned if some cancer curing drug is discovered ?
We actually do see the US and UK sharing vaccine formulas and production techniques on limited basis. However, everyone is scrambling and hoarding lab equipment like pipettes which are in short supply globally. The storm in Texas interrupted global supply of petrochemicals used to make those plastics, COVID is slowing do production in SE Asia, trade weirdness has containers in all the wrong places right now, and in general demand is WAY up everywhere.
Fundamentally its a question of values, what do you think a nation state should do for its own people weighed against its obligations to the rest of the world.
Despite the title this blog post seems to be more about the unfortunate trade that "the commons" did with private inventors: originally patents were meant as an alternative to trade secrets - you revealed the trade secret to the public, and in exchange you got 20 years of exclusive use of said (no-longer-)secret. But now we've got the worts of both worlds: companies patent an essential part of their process to gain e…
But the deal hasn't really changed, companies get protection for the things they reveal in the patent. The thing that has changed is that companies have recognized that they do not need protection/exclusivity, so they do not apply for it. This is presumably in part because they judge successful reverse-engineering to be sufficiently difficult to function as deterrence.
This was not the case before then. I often wondered how the patent system lost it's usefulness, and the article does a pretty good job of explaining this. Sure it has a bias, but I read a lot of financial news, so it's definitely a useful counterpoint.