NOTE: We don't inhabit a fragmented reality. Nothing around us can be isolated from the catastrophic effects of the pandemic we're witnessing. All further posts on this blog will carry this caveat until there is some reasonable accountability established and substantial actions taken against the state's criminal abdication of responsibility.
Below is a non exhaustive list to understanding a bit more about the legal - economic landscape surrounding vaccines in India and globally. There are two areas of this problem that we (or at least I) are ill informed on. First is the central question of who (state or private players) took the initial risk of manufacturing the vaccines and invested in them. This is an important question because it forms the basis of the allegation that private manufacturers used public funds to develop the vaccines which are now being sold for super profits. The second question is with respect to the Intellectual property i.e. who owns these vaccines? This is an important question because if the state has patent rights over the vaccines, then it can use various laws and provisions to quickly scale up production by licensing the technology to various manufactures and companies. If the patent is strictly private, then it is subject to Intellectual property protection laws. What that means is that any and all courses of vaccine production will be decided by the company's profit motive, which will lead to extreme vaccine inequity and poorer countries being the last ones to get the vaccine - which is the status quo as of now. Alex Tabarrok in his congressional hearing succinctly stated the moral and economic case for doing whatever can be done to vaccinate everyone when he said that 'no one is safe until everyone is vaccinated'.
Please feel free to comment down below any other resource you find illuminating.
1. How to vaccinate the world part I
2. How to vaccinate the world part II
3. India's plan to fragment the vaccine market across the states is mind bogglingly bad economics
4. An important change of course by policy in Indian Covid-19 vaccination
5. How will demand change when persons above 18 are eligible
7. Winning the war through vaccines
8.Vaccine companies & the US government snubbed WHO initiative to scale up global manufacturing
9. India's vaccine demand supply math shows shows a royal govt. screw up
10. In India, Covid 19 vaccines face a more urgent problem than IPR
11. Export Bans, TRIPS waiver & Hyper Nationalism
12. The case for suspension of IPR
13. IP rights in Covaxin - Part I
14. IP rights in Covaxin - Part II
15. The need for an IP policy to build a strategic stockpile for pandemics
16. NLUD's panel discussion on IP and the pandemic
17. Arguments for waiver of TRIPS by public citizen's global trade watch
I thank Sandesh Atyam for his contribution in curating this list.
EDIT 1: A few hours after posting this, US released a statement that it will support waiving TRIPS at the next WTO meeting.
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