Public Lies and Public Goods: Ten Lessons From When Patents and Pandemics Meet

Patent system is a huge source of risk when it comes to managing the risks of pandemics. In the field of health, patents basically exist to commodify human suffering, as commodification is the point of patents. Facing most recent pandemic crises such as the avian influenza virus in 2004, the HIV in 1984, and the COVID-19 in 2019, last developed countries prompted to request IP waivers from key sections of the TRIPS agreement, hence showing how significant for the anti-pandemic process was the protection of IP rights for the circulation and commercialisation of both vaccine and drug treatments. From the recent history of patents and pandemics, ten core lessons for developing countries could be extracted, whose importance of the spread of manufacturing know-how to increasing the capacity and quality in all industries is significant. For developing countries, formal negotiations by coalitions of developing countries to modify the rules of a globalized intellectual property paradigm - in order to improve access to knowledge and technology - needs the backing of an even longer-term informal networking strategy. Moreover, this informal networking strategy needs to focus on collaborations among developing countries with the aim of building a wide base of rich manufacturing experience in the production of medicines and therapies, since developing countries cannot roll back the global intellectual property system.