My Answers to HWcase1, Q3

Facts of the case:

After the first vaccines were developed for Covid-19, many rich countries were the first to receive it while poorer countries had to wait. They were also unable to make their own versions of the vaccine due to the patents owned by the developing countries. Many were left wondering if it was ethical to allow patent laws to keep these countries from making use of the vaccines more quickly.

 

Analysis:

1.)     Question: Should there be some medicines or treatments that can’t be patented because the treatment is too important?

Answer: It’s a tough choice but I think the answer should be no. If any disease is so serious that it supposedly doesn’t warrant patenting, then I feel these patents deserve the most protection. Developing treatments for illness is expensive and companies should be rewarded for making them so that they will continue to make them. While the pharmaceutical companies did make a lot of money from the Covid vaccines I think society as whole enjoyed a far greater benefit from protection from the virus.

2.)     Question: Medical treatments often come from publicly funded science. Pharmaceutical companies will then often sell these treatments at high prices. Are these high prices ethical when the research was publicly funded?

Answer: Yes, it is ethical. Companies often don’t capture all the benefits from research that they fund so it makes sense for governments to fund science to overcome this incentive problem. While companies do benefit from this, I would say that again society benefits more from science and technology advancing. The high prices of medical treatments are a complicated issue but there are several ideas which could work to lower them. Therefore, the ethical choice would be to enact policy reforms to lower prices while preserving existing patents in order to generate future breakthroughs.

3.)     Question: It’s been argued that patents incentivize the development of new technologies. Suppose patents for needed treatments were waived and more people received them. Would this be worthwhile even if medical progress wasn’t as fast?

 

Answer: I don’t think so. While I sympathize with people who are concerned about helping the less fortunate I think a greater total number of people are helped by insuring continual progress in medical technology.

 

My conclusions:

Overall, I’m in favor of keeping the existing system of patents as related to medical technology. We’ve benefitted enormously from advancements in medical technology and in order to make sure we keep benefitting its important that innovation is incentivized. While waiving patents for some treatments may help some more people in the short term, in the long term I think this idea is harmful. That being said, I think previous deals to license vaccines sounds like a wonderful alternative and I’m in favor of that.

Future environment:

Right now, scientists are having many successes with reversing aging in animals and there are current efforts to do this in humans. So, I imagine in the future we will gain the ability to significantly extend healthy human lifespan.

 

Future scenario:

When significant human life extension becomes possible I imagine the ethical issues raised in this case will also be relevant. Should we try to waive patents to ensure that life extension technology is widely available? If that were to happen then I would actually reverse my stance and call for these patents to be waived. Extending healthy human life is the point of medicine so in many ways this would be the ultimate achievement of medicine. In that case the benefit from making the treatment widely available would be so enormous that I think it would justify waiving the patent for it.