President Joe Biden Supports Ignoring Patent Rights For COVID-19 Vaccines, Vaccine Producers' Stock Prices Drop

President of the United States Joe Biden. (Wikimedia Commons/Gage Skidmore)

JAKARTA - United States President Joe Biden expressed his support behind the waiver of intellectual property rights or patents for the COVID-19 vaccine. The move, which is backed by more than 100 countries, but angers pharmaceutical companies.

President Joe Biden's stance in favor of this temporary waiver was quickly followed by Head of Trade Negotiations Katherine Tai, who described the current situation as extraordinary.

"This is a global health crisis, and the extraordinary circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic require extraordinary action," Tai said in a statement.

President Biden's move won praise from the head of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who called it a 'Monumental Moment in the War on #COVID19' on Twitter.

Along with President Joe Biden's support, shares of a number of COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers plummeted, with the two largest COVID-19 vaccine makers coming from the United States, namely Moderna Inc., and Pfizer Inc.

Tai said the United States would participate in text-based negotiations at the WTO to ensure abandonment could occur but warned that those negotiations would take time.

The United States and several other countries have previously blocked negotiations at the WTO on a waiver proposal led by India and South Africa, which aims to help developing countries produce COVID-19 vaccines using pharmaceutical companies' IPs.

"The administration firmly believes in the protection of intellectual property, but is in service to end this pandemic, supporting the abandonment of such protections for the COVID-19 vaccine," she explained.

Meanwhile, the Geneva, Switzerland-based Federation of International Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations (IFPMA) said President Joe Biden's support to rule out patents for the COVID-19 vaccine is the wrong answer to a complex problem. And, calling for more technology transfer agreements.

"Waiving the COVID-19 vaccine patent will not increase production or provide the practical solutions needed to combat this global health crisis. Instead, it is likely to cause disruption," IFPMA, representing a research-based pharmaceutical company, said in a statement.

"The real challenges are trade barriers, bottlenecks in supply chains, scarcity of raw materials, and the willingness of rich countries to start sharing doses with poor countries," the statement continued.

Separately, Amesh Adalja, senior expert at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security said, "the abandonment of patents equates to taking over the property of a pharmaceutical company whose innovation and financial investment enables the development of a COVID-19 vaccine."