Nick Dearden's at it again

Nick Dearden is the director of Global Justice Now and, as ever, he’s calling for the radical overthrow of international capitalism and all that. Also as ever he’s missing the actual point of how the system works today.

Yet if his government’s actions are anything to go by, it seems more interested in siding with big pharmaceutical corporations than turning vaccine research into a genuinely collective endeavour......The last straw came on Friday, when the government refused to support a World Health Organization initiative to encourage countries to share research on coronavirus treatments and produce any final medicines patent-free. This would mean they could be distributed fairly according to need......Two weeks ago, British officials attempted to water down a resolution at the World Health Assembly to create a global “patent pool”, which would have encouraged the production of patent-free coronavirus drugs. Then, on Friday, they declined to support the new WHO initiative for pooling research......

And so on. Patents are horrible things, capitalists profiting from the poor and, and, abolish capitalism!

Entirely and wholly missing the point of what is going on. Knowledge, like what formulation of vaccine actually works, is a public good. This being a technical terms meaning terribly difficult for a private economic actor to profit from having made it. As profit cannot be made therefore private economic actors motivated by profit will not produce public goods.

So, we invent patents - in other areas copyright does the same job - so that profit is possible and thus private economic actors, motivated by profit, do produce them.

It’s entirely possible to think of other ways this might be done. Government could employ all the drug researchers and thus we get what government makes. Good luck with that if we’re to be appropriately cynical - PHE, given the track record on track and trace, might have something available in 2031. Being more idealistic, OK, perhaps charity, government, acting together, might produce something and then give that knowledge away for free.

Dearden though isn’t saying that. Instead he’s trying to insist that those private sector actors, motivated by profit, should be devoting their assets to this battle for free. Gilead, Moderna, anyone else with anything that might work, should take the hundreds of millions, billions, from their shareholders and make a gift of it to an adoring world.

Well, why would they? That being the bit that Dearden is missing - deliberately perhaps, through ignorance possibly. The entire idea of patents is that we get all that expertise and effort from all those people in those drug companies. Because we’ve already agreed - in our definition of a public good - that without some such action we’ll not get all that effort and expertise addressing the problem we face, the desire for a vaccine.

Dearden is vituperating against the very solution. He wants to abolish the system that produces the cure. Which really doesn’t sound like a good way of gaining justice, now or in the future, global or not.

Note that it’s even possible to do what is being demanded here, confiscate all those patents and declare them free to all. The problem there being that no one will work on the next problem we might face….