TAPP Urges Senate HELP Committee Members to Support Patent Protections

The Senate HELP committee meets today, March 22, to discuss the price of COVID-19 vaccines. Trade Alliance to Promote Prosperity has written to Senate HELP Committee members to express our concerns with anti-innovation policies and to urge committee members to support patent protections.

The vaccine discussion will certainly turn into a conversation on patent protections and intellectual property. Some members of the committee promote anti-innovation and anti-competitive policies that target patent protections for medical innovators.

In their attempt to reduce the cost of the COVID-19 vaccine, policymakers have adopted some controversial and destructive approaches to patent policy: Section 1498 government patent use and march-in rights.

Certain advocacy groups have called on President Biden to use a provision of Section 1498 that they claim gives the president the power to break patent barriers and interfere with private patents.

Section 1498 was originally created to prevent the government from doing exactly what these people want President Biden to do, but the law has become so mangled in recent years that it is unrecognizable from its original drafting.

Exercising march-in rights on COVID-19 vaccines is another disastrous policy idea that destroys patent protections and denies medical innovators the right to profit from their investment, while also straying far away from its original intent.

The Bayh-Dole Act includes a provision for the feds to “march in” on inventions, including pharmaceuticals, created with federal funds—under a narrow set of circumstances—and force patent holders to grant a license to a “responsible applicant,” effectively negating patent protections.

One of these circumstances in which a patent may be negated occurs when “health or safety needs not reasonably satisfied” by the patent holder or licensee.”

Misapplication of the Bayh-Dole Act’s provisions as is being suggested for COVID-19 would seriously hinder incentives for the life science industry to create new, life-saving medicines. As a result, doctors’ choices for treatment would be limited and patients would suffer.

These anti-innovation policies would be detrimental to patent protections, medical innovations, and American doctors and patients.

They must be opposed.