(2021-05-06) ZviM Covid 5/06 Vaccine Patent Suspension

Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid-19 5/6: Vaccine Patent Suspension. The Biden administration’s latest strategy for the pandemic is to suspend the vaccine patents without compensation. Our life expectancies are lower than they were last week.

I like the idea of rewarding those who do amazing things for myself and for the world

The Numbers

India

Things continue to get worse in India, but the graph no longer looks as fully vertical as it did previously, so this continues to count as good news relative to the range of possible outcomes

Vaccinations

As a reminder, we were once over 3 million doses, and we’re giving out more second doses now than we were then.

Every week, the graph of vaccinations looks more like the electoral college maps:

it’s clear that the vaccinations are corresponding to very rapid declines in infection rates around the world, and I notice that I’m somewhat confused by how big this effect turned out to be.

Indian Strain Does Not Escape from Vaccines

The situation in India is terrible, but at least there is this bit of good news – the vaccines will continue to function, at least against the current strain:

If there’s one place I’m most worried about engaging in motivated reasoning, it’s the possibility of vaccine escape. I notice a much larger flinch away from looking here than I do elsewhere

P.1 Is The Medium-Term Infection

In many ways it is better to think of Covid-19 as a series of different infections from different variants. When the English strain shows up, it starts again from patient zero, starts again in each nation and region, and grows

I worried last week that in relatively hesitant areas, we might run out of willing arms before we get to herd immunity. That is still a real worry, but I am not worried that large other areas won’t get to New York’s current effective immunity level given how many vaccinated people aren’t yet finished being vaccinated. That doesn’t allow a safe return to normal, but it does allow suppression when combined with moderate levels of precaution from the unvaccinated.

Exploring Vaccine Hesitancy

What are the real reasons for vaccine hesitancy?

There’s a lot of plausible candidates for the most common true objection.

A survey about vaccine hesitancy in the army has some good data on this, and is worth looking at in detail

*Or in written list form:

It’s not FDA approved. It hasn’t been proven safe. What’s the point? I’d still need to wear a mask. This is the first time I get to tell the army NO! I am not in a high-risk population. I already had Covid-19. The vaccine symptoms are worse than the virus.*

The first category (1,2,9 and 11) are the straightforward safety concerns. These concerns are wrong, but I say that as someone who knows they are wrong

In related news, Stat News argues that the emergency use status of the vaccines shouldn’t interfere with vaccine mandates by employers and schools. As a matter of law I think they’re probably right (although of course I Am Not a Lawyer and all that) but as a matter of practicality this is a strong argument that it’s important that the FDA needs to issue a full approval. We’ve just had the biggest Phase 4 in history. Taking at least Pfizer and Moderna from ‘emergency’ use to full approval would do a lot to reduce hesitancy and free the hands of those who want to mandate vaccinations, without being coercive.

It’s interesting when they strengthen the answer to the point of deception, and when they weaken the response to the point where it doesn’t respond to the concern.

*Instead, “I just feel skeptical and don’t know what to believe” elicits this response:

“The choice to get vaccinated is a personal decision and should not be taken lightly*

Suddenly we’re acting like this is a Very Reasonable and Responsible Position, which needs to be solved by consulting official sources and doing further research.

NPR claims that lower rates of vaccinations among blacks and latinos are entirely due to accessibility issues and have nothing to do with hesitancy. I completely buy that the access issues are doing a lot of work here, but it seems odd to attempt to suddenly shift from “here are all the legitimate and sympathetic reasons why these groups would be hesitant” into “they are not and have never been hesitant, it’s that we didn’t give them access and made access depend on things that systematically excluded them.”

Overall, that evidence means that the article seems like very good news. What it does make a strong case for is that there is a lot of ‘soft demand.’ The bad scenario for where we are would be that 60% of eligible people have already been vaccinated, and most of the remaining 40% are actively having none of it.

This seems highly plausible to me, that there are essentially three camps rather than two camps. There’s the people who want the vaccine enough to ‘bid’ on it in various ways and make it a priority. There’s the people who actively don’t want the vaccine, often violently so. But then there’s also a large group, plausibly larger than the second group, who are fine with it but are mostly trying to live their lives and value the vaccine at some positive but small number.

What’s The Worst Possible Thing You Could Do?

If you’re the President of the United States

the answer would be to sabotage vaccine production and distribution. Nothing else comes close. One could plausibly argue that nothing else even much matters.

*How would one sabotage vaccine production and distribution?

Sabotaging distribution means doing things like not approving known-to-be-safe-and-effective vaccines, or suspending existing approvals and sending the message the vaccines are unsafe, or holding up distribution to worry about things like equity, or holding onto vaccine doses for extended periods with no intent of approving them ever.

Oh, wait. Those are all things done by the Federal Government during the Biden administration*

The other half of the worst thing you could do is sabotaging production.

The ultimate way to hurt vaccine production, not only now but indefinitely into the future, would of course be to destroy the financial incentive to produce vaccines.

This starts with not paying for building production capacity, and its central action is not paying much per dose or paying more for early delivery.

So it’s a big step-up in the civilizational sabotage game to actively take away the incentive to create vaccines, by stripping away intellectual property protections without any compensation, in the middle of a pandemic

There’s a simple solution to the problem of intellectual property if you wanted to make the situation better rather than worse. You could buy the intellectual property rights from the companies involved

Doing this without compensation is about the worst thing one could do

The message we’ve sent, loud and clear, is that we are not a nation of laws and we do not reward those who deliver the goods for us.

Instead, we retain protections on things like insulin that are pure rent seeking, while taking away protections that are doing exactly what patents are designed to do: reward those who produce world-changing positive innovations via temporary ability to profit.

You see, this will not increase vaccine production

Many people have this idea that all the knowledge and skill required to produce the vaccines lies in the patents. Once you lift the patents, lots of other companies can go start producing vaccines. Except, that’s not actually true

Moderna explicitly already said they wouldn’t enforce the patents, and no one really expected the others to either.

*If there was already clearly no intent to enforce the patents, what good does lifting those patents do?

It sends the message that the United States is willing to confiscate property for political gain, when it feels like it, on the basis of the executive’s say so.*

Won’t Someone Please Think of the Children?

summer camp. Is it safe to send your young child?

*Are all the people you care about that will be in contact with that child either other young children or fully vaccinated by the time the camp starts?

If the answer to that question is yes, then yes.

If the answer to that question is no, then given that vaccinations are now available to everyone pretty much on demand, why isn’t the answer yes?*

My general answers regarding children generalize this. Young children are not at enough risk from Covid to let this change how they live their lives, so them catching it only matters to the extent that they would pass it on to vulnerable others.

In Other News

MIT requires vaccinations, although so far only for students. I expect most colleges to follow suit if only to avoid potential liability concerns. Not spreading the requirement to faculty and staff seems like a clear mistake