US President Biden wants to grind the patent protection for corona vaccines to the cheers of the German Greens.
The idea would be more credible if the USA of all people hadn't followed the most selfish vaccination policy so far.
A comment by Merkur editor-in-chief Georg Anastasiadis.
In the greatest health crisis in modern history, it was not national governments that saved us, but the ingenuity of researchers. Private companies have developed the vaccines that save them in record time. They took enormous financial risks for this, in the hope that if they succeeded, they would be rewarded for it. The jubilation that US President Joe Biden is now getting from the Greens, the SPD and the Left for his proposal to suspend patent protection for vaccine manufacturers shows how little they understand the beneficial effects of market incentives. Anyone who grinds patent protection and thus intellectual property today ensures that companies do not invest in saving medicine again next time.
It is true that rich countries must ensure that sufficient quantities of vaccines also reach poorer countries. This is more than just a human requirement. We, too, are only safe from Corona and its mutations if everyone is safe. Biden's America, with its export bans, was unfortunately not a good role model. Hardly any country was more selfish when it came to helping other countries with vaccines and preliminary products. The idea of now, for example, bleeding German companies like Biontech in order to polish America's battered reputation in the world is quite hypocritical. The same goes for the applause from Paris, whose own medicine champion Sanofi failed in the vaccine development and is happy to see the German competitors being flattened.According to Biontech, the Tübringen company Curevac is also about to approve a corona vaccine.
Yes, America and Europe are rich. Nothing speaks against investing a small part of this wealth in licensing and production cooperations for the benefit of other countries. But expropriating research-based companies for this is unjust and in the end it will cost us all much more.
