The Biden administration says it will support lifting patent protections
Source: New York Times
The Biden administration on Wednesday came out in support of waiving intellectual property protections for Covid-19 vaccines, a breakthrough for international efforts to suspend patent rules as the pandemic rages in India and South America. The United States had been a leading opponent of a proposal at the World Trade Organization to suspend intellectual property protections in an effort to ramp up vaccine production. But President Biden had come under increasing pressure to throw his support behind the proposal, including from many congressional Democrats.
Katherine Tai, the United States trade representative, announced the administration’s position in a statement on Wednesday afternoon. “This is a global health crisis, and the extraordinary circumstances of the Covid-19 pandemic call for extraordinary measures,” she said. “The administration believes strongly in intellectual property protections, but in service of ending this pandemic, supports the waiver of those protections for Covid-19 vaccines.”
Ms. Tai added that the United States would participate in negotiations at the World Trade Organization over the matter, adding, “Those negotiations will take time given the consensus-based nature of the institution and the complexity of the issues involved.” Earlier Wednesday, members of the World Trade Organization held another round of discussions about waiving intellectual property protections. Further discussions are expected in the coming weeks, as India and South Africa, which proposed the waiver, are preparing a revised plan for nations to consider.
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the director general of the World Trade Organization, urged members to proceed with negotiations over the text of the plan. “I am firmly convinced that once we can sit down with an actual text in front of us, we shall find a pragmatic way forward,” she said at a meeting of the organization’s General Council.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/05/us/politics/covid-vaccine-patent-biden.html
Full headline: The Biden administration says it will support lifting patent protections to help produce more vaccines globally.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Sounds like climate negotiations
Meanwhile, Covid19 is being breathed in by millions a day, causing a worldwide reported case rate of over 800,000 a day, reported deaths about 13,000/day. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/world/coronavirus-maps.html
As I understand it, the issue is letting other countries to start producing it for their own populations. I'm not saying we should willy-nilly waive our standards of quality to ramp up production in the U.S. for U.S. use. That's not what the issue of patent protection is about.
I would argue that a competitive military weapon like a tank, ship, or bomber is no more of a "widget" than a vaccine, or that the quality of vaccines was unimportant in WWII. I served on a nuclear submarine (not in WWII 
).
in terms of actually "following the process exactly" with whatever that gets synthesized actually being what it is supposed to be when synthesized. Any slight deviation (pH of buffers, medium temps, centrifuge speeds/timing, etc), might result in a near-identical but slightly different entity (that itself also might have been patented, but was not explicitly approved for manufacture in the agreement). And thus if further protocols were not followed for batch/lot testing of that, no one would be the wiser, and the efficacy might be altered. 
to allow others to make these products. The patents are generally 20 year things for these types of products and these pharmaceutical companies always argue that they take years to come up with this stuff and want exclusivity to market and sell it (at a premium). The "negotiations" are to deal with allowing that proprietary process to be shared with (I assume) some limit to liability of the originator if others using the process "gets it wrong", and I would assume, some agreement to appropriate compensation for giving up that exclusivity (which the DPA can provide).
I think you were arguing "cut the red tape and just make it" and it's not that easy. 
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Nope, didn't mean that at all. I'm talking about waiving the intellectual property rights and don't see why weeks and weeks have to be spent negotiating that with Pfizer etc.. I have no idea how long it will take other companies and countries to start and ramp up quality production, but we need to stop piddling around on intellectual property rights, and get to step 2 really very soon.
Of course. And we don't have to bow down to them in an international crisis. That's my point. In an international crisis (this isn't some "lifestyle drug" ) we don't have to spend weeks and weeks on negotiating with the drug companies something that they will be happy with.
As for liability for when an Indian factory takes the e.g. Pfizer recipe and makes some generic and screws it up, I don't know why Pfizer would be responsible for that, it would be a really stretched case, and I'm sure there is boiler plate language out there used for many other generics that are manufactured by others.
I do believe we (the U.S. government, aka taxpayers) should compensate our pharmaceutical companies (but not up to the level of scarcity-monopolistic pricing), but it's not that we have to spend forever coming up with terms that they will like. We didn't turn our selves into pretzels during WWII when we told companies what to do whether they liked it or not.
and I wouldn't be surprised if things are already getting set up behind the scenes, particularly given past agreements of the sort.
Actually - according to the OP article, it's not so much the U.S. and red tape, but whatever happens with the WHO and the countries at the table who are doing the negotiations (from the OP) -
The "change" was that the U.S. decided to go ahead and join whatever WHO was working on with other interested nation parties and not stand in the way.
(of course WHO has its own issues but that's another subject for another day
)It's those other countries (some of whom may have to deal with their Parliaments and whatnot - particularly if it comes to funding such an endeavor). I.e., the world's "red tape" not ours (although obviously we are "at the table" to monitor). 
(E.g., there has been a chronic problem with reagents and other raw materials and these countries may be trying to get agreements with manufacturers from various other countries to help fulfill that, etc)
