Amid pressure from world leaders, the WTO and the Democrat Party

The Biden administration announced on Wednesday that it supports waiving intellectual property protections for COVID-19 vaccines.

In short, this is a disaster.

An action like this would cause an unprecedented upheaval in the biotech world.

Im not being callous, either.

This is not the solution to getting more reliable vaccines into the hands of people who need them.

And furthermore, this will only hinder the development of good drugs with high efficacy rates down the line.

To understand why, though, we have to start with the basics

Intellectual properties, or IPs, are the cornerstone of protecting a companys product. Whether you want to sell merchandise for a cartoon character or develop a new high-tech fiber cable, IPs protect you from having that idea stolen out from under you.

This allows the original creators to profit off of what they made.

In the case of the COVID-19 vaccine makers, this is even more crucial since the money made off IPs creates funds for the research and development of new, better drugs in the future.

When it comes to COVID-19, its crucial to keep the foot on the gas so we can stamp this thing out quickly and efficiently.

We are far from being out of the woods yet.

Theres still going to be a need for booster shots and treatments with new variants of COVID-19 popping up in different countries.

A second wave of a new variant can be more easily combatted by the companies that already know what theyre doing.

And if you take away the profits they get from this initial wave, we make them less equipped to fight it.

Remember too, these companies took a major risk in the research and development of these vaccines.

Pfizer, for instance, poured $1 billion of its own money into developing its version of the mRNA vaccine.

It didnt take any government handouts. It used the profits from its other successful IP-protected drugs to get this vaccine out.

And though they were looking at still profiting off of it, the pricing didnt fall on the consumer.

This was a goodwill move through and through. And if it ever comes time for biotech to save the world again, what message will that send to them if we dont repay the favor?

The second big thing to note here is that lifting IP protections isnt a magic solution to immediately start production up across the world.

There are problems galore when it comes to the creation of these vaccines.

Remember, the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines are a brand-new type of vaccine that has never been successfully done before: using mRNA.

They are a complicated new form of vaccine that requires materials and assembly unlike weve ever seen.

Think about it this way

If Apple were forced to give up its patent for its M1 processor the processor chip that powers iPhones and iPads the companies around the world wanting to put that into their phones would still need to find a way to create the 5-nanometer silicon chip.

MRNA vaccines are on a whole new level of complication, and it would take months for production to even begin on these kind of vaccines

By that time, more effort could be poured into the creation and scaling of more vaccines from the companies that already know how to make them.

Furthermore, the logistics of these vaccines are already complicated as it is.

Remember what happened with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine? Millions of doses were ruined because of negligence at an Emergent BioSolutions plant in Baltimore.

Whats going to happen when you allow a third party of a third party to try to create a very complicated vaccine with just the blueprint?

To fix this dire situation, the best thing to do is to ramp up the current production we have and get those vaccines out to the world.

The Biden administration already gave the go-ahead to give away a stockpile of AstraZeneca to other nations.

This is the way to end the pandemic taking away the IPs from these companies just pulls the rug out from under them.

To a bright future,

Ray Blanco