Joe Stiglitz appears remarkably unobservant for a Nobel Laureate

Joe Stigltiz tells us that this is vitally important:

Only when they all agree to the WTO waiver will they have done what is necessary. But there will still be more to do, including incentivising the transfer of technology. Only then can vaccine production be adequately ramped up around the world. And only then will we really be able to effectively counter the spread of the virus.

Well, no. It’s not true that vaccine production needs to be ramped up around the world. It is true that vaccine production should be ramped up for the world though. Which is a rather different thing.

To illustrate, there’s no point at all in Cabo Verde, with half a million people, producing its own vaccines. That’s as sensible as suggesting Bristol does and that’s not including Clifton. But that seems to be what is being suggested:

What is needed is for Germany to agree to a temporary exemption from the World Trade Organization’s intellectual property rules. These currently stifle the worldwide production of Covid-19 vaccines and antiviral treatments. If this barrier were removed, more vaccine doses could be produced in, and for, developing countries. That is exactly what the world needs, as the emergence of the Omicron variant is proving, all over again.

What is needed is that vaccines are produced, not where they are produced. And it’s only if the patent on a vaccine is the scarce resource that freeing that patent will increase vaccine production.

From those who actually know their onions in this field patents are not, in fact, the constraint. Anyone who has the ability and capacity to manufacture extant vaccines can gain access to the right to do so. What is lacking is industrial capacity, not access to the patents that is. So, the patent waiver would not solve the problem then, would it?

It’s also interesting the specificity about Germany. That’s where BioNTech is based of course. That Pfizer manufactured and distributed vaccine, part of that programme where Pfizer spent its own money, thinking that taking government cash, with bureaucratic oversight, would slow things down.

So, the actual proposal is that the private property of those folks should be taken in order to produce nothing of value to the vaccine rollout. Except, of course, to the great disincentive of anyone in the future agreeing to spend their own money trying to solve a global problem.

It might be possible to disagree more strongly with this suggestion but at the very least we’d say that this, coming from a Nobel Laureate in economics, is remarkably unobservant as a suggestion.