From the article:
“From early in the pandemic, there were lots of smart people at the Gates Foundation thinking about how to structure financing and incentives for accelerating vaccine development,” Justin Sandefur, senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, a nonprofit think tank based in London and Washington, DC, told me. “To their credit, they worked on this really early on. They convinced themselves that IP was important.”
(In May, after the Biden administration’s reversal, the Gates Foundation actually reversed course, too, expressing support for a limited waiver.)
Many other global health experts have also made the case that waivers would be a bad idea. Vaccine makers “are already cooperating widely with competitors and generic manufacturers, including via voluntary licenses, contracted production, and proactive technology transfer,” the CGD’s Rachel Silverman argued in a CGD-hosted debate about whether to waive IP. “Diluting that commercial incentive may reduce their interest in pursuing the voluntary horizontal collaborations that are already driving scale.”
