Humanity cannot afford a COVID‑19 patent battle
The development of vaccines and therapeutics for COVID-19 requires a concerted global commitment to share research.
Global research effort is usually highly competitive and undertaken by diverse parties. In the COVID-19 context, this may result in discrepancy between the amount of public funding available and the cost of developing effective vaccines.
Intellectual property rights (particularly patents) on the technology behind vaccines can encourage innovation and safeguard investment in research and development. However, they can slow down development. Finding the right balance and coordinating a rapid response to this pandemic is vital.
The COVID-19 pandemic has seen Australia, and other countries, committing promptly to contributing toward a shared research and funding effort.
Funding
Australian Research Council
History
Publication title
Australian Academy of ScienceVolume
JulyISSN
1031-9204Department/School
Faculty of LawPublisher
Australian Academy of SciencePlace of publication
AustraliaRights statement
© 2020 Nicol and Nielsen. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.Repository Status
- Open
