By Rhys Adams ‘26

For 20 months, between the autumn of 2020 and the summer of 2022, the pharmaceutical world undertook a Homeric battle relating to COVID-19. If you’re thinking of the battle to distribute the COVID vaccine to as many people as possible, you’re wrong. In October 2020, India and South Africa submitted a petition to the World Trade Organization to “suspend IP on all COVID-19 vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics until widespread…immunity among people in low- and middle-income countries.” These countries weren’t asking for free vaccines; they weren’t asking for vaccine logistics; they weren’t asking for humanitarian aid; they were simply asking for the requisite information to create COVID vaccines and treatments themselves.

For 20 months, the movement grew. Every country in South Asia, every country in Africa, groups like Médecins Sans Frontières, countries as close to the US as Haiti, and even India’s long-time adversary of Pakistan joined together to entreat pharmaceutical-heavy countries (identified by the The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in 2023 as Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States) to prioritize the lives of developing countries’ residents over the monopolistic advantages of vaccine companies. Eventually, the petition’s four target countries agreed to negotiate a partial licensing agreement for COVID vaccines after the European Union, the US Trade Representative, and the Swiss International Mission launched multiple bids to freeze the proposal.

Too damn late. Despite the United States’s harebrained response to the pandemic, both India and South Africa saw noticeably higher mortality rates for new COVID cases than the US, with South Africa’s rate over 127% higher than America’s. Furthermore, COVID-19 claimed as many as 4.1 million lives in India while the patent waiver languished in committee, and The Hindu reports in 2022 that up to 63% of those deaths were preventable. Hoarding drugs constitutes knowingly ending countless lives. Accordingly, the United States and other international power-players ought to do everything in their power to abolish—or at least diminish the power of—international medical patents.

Even in normal times, the handful of companies that dominate the pharmaceutical industry struggle to match the demand for their products. According to Enrico Colombatto, an economics professor at the University of Turin, the secrecy with which drug manufacturers conduct research and development drastically depressed supply in the long run. The world’s 20 largest pharmaceutical companies, only one of which is located outside the US or Europe, simply cannot—or will not—perform their basic capitalistic role: manufacturing enough drugs to treat all those who are willing to buy them. This monetary standard is in-and-of-itself ridiculous, but even within its confines, pharmaceutical companies have allowed abject market failure: 128 drugs are on the shortage list in the US alone, including everything from amoxicillin to amphetamines. More crucially, a 2018 study in the Lancet Journal of Diabetes & Endocrinology held that 50.63% of global diabetics will lack access to insulin by 2030, especially in the “African, Asian and Oceania regions.” Since then, companies have actually fallen behind insulin production benchmarks. Furthermore, just nine months ago, British company GlaxoSmithKline discontinued four life-saving HIV/AIDS drugs, in part because the pharmaceutical conglomerate didn’t feel the need to compete in African markets, feeling their dominance was protected by IP laws.

Most of The Milton Paper’s readers are too young to remember when gay Americans died of AIDS by the hundreds of thousands while drug companies charged extortionist prices, but every single person reading this article lives in a world where over 500,000 people in sub-Saharan Africa lack access to easy-to-produce HIV drugs. The Kenya AIDS NGOs Consortium, the Third World Network, Harvard’s Center for Health Law Policy, and the University of São Paulo’s IR Institute have all endorsed patent buyouts or all-out bans, but don’t let that convince you. Let Melinda Richter, Global Head of Johnson & Johnson Innovation and a woman who has long been against enforcing medical patents, convince you. If patent reform were harmful to the people who produce life-saving drugs, then those very people wouldn’t be endorsing it. Nobody is healthy in a sick world. Call your representative. Write President Biden. Tell them to stand with the global consensus and push the US to advocate the abolition—or at least, the buyout—of all medical patents.

For 20 months, between the autumn of 2020 and the summer of 2022, the pharmaceutical world undertook a Homeric battle relating to COVID-19. If you’re thinking of the battle to distribute the COVID vaccine to as many people as possible, you’re wrong. In October 2020, India and South Africa submitted a petition to the World Trade Organization to “suspend IP on all COVID-19 vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics until widespread…immunity among people in low- and middle-income countries.” These countries weren’t asking for free vaccines; they weren’t asking for vaccine logistics; they weren’t asking for humanitarian aid; they were simply asking for the requisite information to create COVID vaccines and treatments themselves.

For 20 months, the movement grew. Every country in South Asia, every country in Africa, groups like Médecins Sans Frontières, countries as close to the US as Haiti, and even India’s long-time adversary of Pakistan joined together to entreat pharmaceutical-heavy countries (identified by the The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in 2023 as Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States) to prioritize the lives of developing countries’ residents over the monopolistic advantages of vaccine companies. Eventually, the petition’s four target countries agreed to negotiate a partial licensing agreement for COVID vaccines after the European Union, the US Trade Representative, and the Swiss International Mission launched multiple bids to freeze the proposal.

Too damn late. Despite the United States’s harebrained response to the pandemic, both India and South Africa saw noticeably higher mortality rates for new COVID cases than the US, with South Africa’s rate over 127% higher than America’s. Furthermore, COVID-19 claimed as many as 4.1 million lives in India while the patent waiver languished in committee, and The Hindu reports in 2022 that up to 63% of those deaths were preventable. Hoarding drugs constitutes knowingly ending countless lives. Accordingly, the United States and other international power-players ought to do everything in their power to abolish—or at least diminish the power of—international medical patents.

Even in normal times, the handful of companies that dominate the pharmaceutical industry struggle to match the demand for their products. According to Enrico Colombatto, an economics professor at the University of Turin, the secrecy with which drug manufacturers conduct research and development drastically depressed supply in the long run. The world’s 20 largest pharmaceutical companies, only one of which is located outside the US or Europe, simply cannot—or will not—perform their basic capitalistic role: manufacturing enough drugs to treat all those who are willing to buy them. This monetary standard is in-and-of-itself ridiculous, but even within its confines, pharmaceutical companies have allowed abject market failure: 128 drugs are on the shortage list in the US alone, including everything from amoxicillin to amphetamines. More crucially, a 2018 study in the Lancet Journal of Diabetes & Endocrinology held that 50.63% of global diabetics will lack access to insulin by 2030, especially in the “African, Asian and Oceania regions.” Since then, companies have actually fallen behind insulin production benchmarks. Furthermore, just nine months ago, British company GlaxoSmithKline discontinued four life-saving HIV/AIDS drugs, in part because the pharmaceutical conglomerate didn’t feel the need to compete in African markets, feeling their dominance was protected by IP laws.

Most of The Milton Paper’s readers are too young to remember when gay Americans died of AIDS by the hundreds of thousands while drug companies charged extortionist prices, but every single person reading this article lives in a world where over 500,000 people in sub-Saharan Africa lack access to easy-to-produce HIV drugs. The Kenya AIDS NGOs Consortium, the Third World Network, Harvard’s Center for Health Law Policy, and the University of São Paulo’s IR Institute have all endorsed patent buyouts or all-out bans, but don’t let that convince you. Let Melinda Richter, Global Head of Johnson & Johnson Innovation and a woman who has long been against enforcing medical patents, convince you. If patent reform were harmful to the people who produce life-saving drugs, then those very people wouldn’t be endorsing it. Nobody is healthy in a sick world. Call your representative. Write President Biden. Tell them to stand with the global consensus and push the US to advocate the abolition—or at least, the buyout—of all medical patents.

The Global South is Correct: Abolish Medical Patents