A patent waiver is a bad deal for WA

If Washington state were a country, it would be the 26th-largest economy in the world. Last year, our economic output reached more than $577 billion.
 
It’s a testament to the millions of Washingtonians — many of whom I had the privilege to meet as governor — working in critical industries ranging from aerospace to advanced manufacturing to the life sciences across the state.

Unfortunately, every one of those sectors and the countless jobs they support would be jeopardized by a World Trade Organization proposal that the U.S. government must vote on. It’s up to Washington state’s leaders in Congress to put a stop to this dangerous plan.

The proposal concerns the World Trade Organization’s Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Agreement, which was ratified in 1995 and establishes minimum protections for intellectual property rights — patent rights — around the world.

In 2022, the WTO, with the support of the U.S., waived the TRIPS agreement for the manufacturing of COVID-19 vaccines under the well-intentioned belief that doing so would help to increase supplies of vaccines in lower- and middle-income countries. But despite those good intentions, the waiver did not appreciably increase the vaccination rate.

The issue was not supply; the world was so awash in vaccine supply that many nations had to throw away doses. And it wasn’t IP preventing shots from getting in arms around the world. Rather, it was logistical and distribution challenges and vaccine hesitancy.

South Africa and India, which originally proposed the TRIPS waiver, are now pushing to expand it to COVID tests and treatments. Yet diagnostics and therapeutics are similarly in surplus, and the evidence is once again overwhelming that intellectual property protections have not impeded access.

Of the 35 million courses of treatment received by governments and nongovernmental organizations for low- and middle-income countries, fewer than one-third had been administered as of September 2022.

Even so, the U.S. government must decide how it will vote on the waiver expansion. To help make its decision, the administration asked the U.S. International Trade Organization to compile a report on the current universe of COVID diagnostics and therapeutics. Released in October 2023, it clearly shows that IP rights aren’t impeding access to treatments in poor and developing countries.

Suspending intellectual property protections without compelling and specific reason would create a dangerous precedent, one that will negatively impact job-supporting, high-tech industries here in Washington and across the nation.

Current IP protections provide an incentive for expensive and risky investments. Consider drug development. It takes, on average, 12 years and $2.8 billion to bring a single new medicine to market. The costs are so steep because of the enormously high failure rate — about 90% of experimental medicines that enter clinical trials never receive FDA approval.

Entrepreneurs and investors are willing to take such risks only if they have confidence that any potential breakthrough will be protected and can’t be freely copied by, or given away to, competitors.

Without such assurances, valuable and potentially lifesaving research and innovation will go unpursued. And biotech firms, including many here in Washington, will find themselves on shakier footing.

At the end of last year, Seattle Children’s launched a biotech called BrainChild BIO to help accelerate the development of T-cell therapies in central nervous system tumors. Washington State University is developing a new bioreactor designed to grow T-cells that help kill cancer. It is programs like these that are in danger of losing investment with looser IP enforcement — and patients are the ones who will suffer.

By design, the TRIPS waiver would result in a mandatory transfer of patented U.S. technologies and trade secrets to competitors abroad, including our adversaries. Rivals would get to help themselves to the fruit of the vast investments in innovation that Americans have made.

With so much on the line here and around the nation, endorsing the waiver proposal would be a counterproductive and self-defeating strategy.

There are still a few weeks left until the Biden administration has to take a position on the proposed waiver expansion. Washington’s congressional delegation must spend every one of them declaring their opposition to the erosion of the intellectual property rights undergirding so many of our industries — or risk the jobs of thousands of hardworking Washingtonians.