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AFTER WEEKS OF immense pressure, the Biden administration came out in support<\/a> of waiving intellectual property rights to coronavirus vaccines. Shortly after the Biden announcement earlier this month, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation also reversed course<\/a> and endorsed the patent waiver. But Bill Gates himself, subject to revived scrutiny around sexual misconduct<\/a> and perhaps the most powerful person in global health, hasn\u2019t budged. While United States residents are being quickly vaccinated and may see an end to the pandemic in sight, most countries in the world will likely have to wait years<\/a> for many of their vaccine doses, in a situation being described as \u201cvaccine apartheid<\/a>.\u201d Almost half of all vaccine shots<\/a> have been administered in just 16 rich countries, and India is weathering a horrific coronavirus crisis<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Global health czar Bill Gates had other thoughts. Maintaining his steadfast commitment to intellectual property rights, Gates pushed for a plan<\/a> that would permit companies to hold exclusive rights to lifesaving medicines, no matter how much they benefited from public funding. Given the enormous influence Gates has in the global public health world, his vision ultimately won out in the Covax<\/a> program\u2014which enshrines monopoly patent rights and relies on the charitable whims of rich countries and pharmaceutical giants to provide vaccines to most of the world. A chorus of support<\/a> from pharmaceutical companies and the Trump administration didn\u2019t hurt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Should we be surprised that a monopolist-turned-philanthropist maintains his commitment to monopoly patent rights as a philanthropist too?<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2001, Gates emerged from an antitrust saga determined<\/a> to vindicate his reputation. The federal government\u2019s case against Microsoft was novel in that it targeted what was at the time a new type of monopolistic practice: \u201cintellectual property antitrust<\/a>.\u201d In Microsoft\u2019s case, this looked like the manipulation of its software in anticompetitive ways, and it painted Gates as a ruthless monopolist. (Microsoft ended up settling with the government.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gates chose to launder his reputation by tried and true philanthropic giving. But as he pivoted to global health, his faith in exclusive IP rights remained unchanged<\/a>. If they helped him build a global software empire, apparently they should help him save lives in the Global South too\u2014despite evidence from the AIDS<\/a> and polio<\/a> epidemics to the contrary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gates\u2019 first foray began unexpectedly in 1999, on the heels of a failed Western crackdown on South Africa after it flouted AIDS medicine patents due to outrageous drug prices<\/a> and a debilitating HIV outbreak. Ultimately, a global activist movement succeeded in pressuring the US government and large pharmaceutical interests to back down\u2014despite the fact that the Gates Foundation was concurrently handing out pamphlets at the WHO touting the benefits of monopoly patent rights and investing<\/a> in approaches to the AIDS crisis that would preserve companies\u2019 property rights in the future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Throughout the last two decades, Gates has repeatedly advocated<\/a> for public health policies that bolster companies\u2019 ability to exclude others from producing lifesaving drugs, including allowing the Gates Foundation itself to acquire<\/a> substantial intellectual property. This continues through the Covid-19 pandemic. On top of steering the global health community towards Covax rather than patent-free technology sharing, last year Gates bragged about<\/a> convincing Oxford University not<\/em> to open-license its vaccine. Gates leveraged his $750 million donation to the university for vaccine research\u2014even though its vaccine was developed in a publicly funded lab. Eventually, Oxford sold the sole right of production to AstraZeneca, with no guarantee of low prices and an extraordinary opportunity for profit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Last October, recognizing that monopoly vaccine patents would be the norm and countries would have to compete against each other to purchase doses, a coalition of countries led by India and South Africa brought a patent waiver proposal<\/a> to the World Trade Organization\u2019s TRIPS (Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) council. As recently as a couple weeks ago, Bill Gates has continued to speak out<\/a> against this proposal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gates\u2019 argument about the TRIPS waiver\u2014and the one being vociferously lobbied<\/a> by pharmaceutical companies\u2014is that waiving patent rights would not help poor countries scale up manufacturing and would instead eliminate incentives for future research. South Africa has strongly rebutted<\/a> concerns about manufacturing capacity, and it is undeniable that waiving patent rights could only increase vaccination rates worldwide. Although this alone wouldn\u2019t give poorer countries the instructions to make that vaccine, that is exactly why Biden must support a crucial aspect of the TRIPS proposal\u2014mandating technology transfer<\/a> for how to produce the vaccine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Moreover, vaccine companies have profited more than enough from their investments. Pfizer spent $3 billion in vaccine research but stands to make $26 billion in vaccine sales<\/a> in 2021. As economist Jayati Ghosh explained, massive government subsidies<\/a>, including $12 billion from the US alone, seemed to almost entirely cover the cost of vaccine research. It is no secret that Moderna\u2019s vaccine was basically entirely funded by the US government.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It should come as no surprise that a monopolist billionaire-philanthropist is committed to the monopolistic status quo\u2014Rob Reich and I had Bill Gates in mind when we wrote about the risks of relying on elite philanthropists<\/a> to make decisions crucial to our health and democracy early in the pandemic. Prior to the Biden administration\u2019s reversal, there was mounting criticism of Bill Gates\u2019 role in the West\u2019s vaccine hoarding. In the wake of the political reversal and news of Gates\u2019 big-dollar divorce, that critical eye has seemed to move on. Yet full tech transfer hasn\u2019t happened, TRIPS negotiations are extremely slow<\/a>, and we can only assume that we will have this same dilemma in the next public health crises (or for that matter, in Bill Gates\u2019 other main philanthropic area of interest, climate change<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Going forward, how do we reckon with the global consequences of elite philanthropy when they have an imperialist<\/a> flavor? Given the long history of the West\u2019s extraction of wealth and resources from other countries, it should also not surprise us that those Western countries want to hoard scientific innovations that they have the wealth and stability to produce (often drawing on talent from the Global South).<\/p>\n\n\n\n The question is not whether people in rich, Western countries will be prioritized over people in the Global South. Rather, it\u2019s whether large Western corporations will benefit to the detriment of people everywhere\u2014indeed, everyone loses if restrictive patents and vaccine nationalism<\/a> allow new strains to continue to extend the pandemic and its human toll. Again: Not even most Westerners are better off when corporate elites like Bill Gates and the pharmaceutical lobby seem consistently to call the shots. A patent-free People\u2019s Vaccine<\/a> that all countries do their part to aggressively distribute is the best way out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Excerpted from<\/em> https:\/\/www.wired.com\/story\/opinion-the-world-loses-under-bill-gates-vaccine-colonialism\/<\/em><\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"