The Biden administration says it will support lifting patent protections

[ancianita]

8. Immediate thoughts: Which patents? All of them? If Biden can persuade pharmaceuticals who used the

vaccines as delivery mechanisms to deliver the CRISPR therapies into the outside cytoplasm of human cells, then Biden's covid team could be dealing with pharma, who already paid patent royalties to the scientists who produced the covid virus genetic material mapping and editing. These companies manufacture the vaccine delivery mechanism for the RNAmolecule.

Other countries use mostly AstraZeneca (not an RNA vaccine) and just can't produce enough vaccines, and long term effective enough vaccines, and so they need to borrow intellectual property on U.S.'s RNA vaccines.

I'd be surprised if this was about lifting protections for the patents on the science that enable the vaccines. Mostly because other countries don't yet have the lab capabilities to do the CRISPR work to map and edit virus genetic material.

Those are held by both the institutions (Berkeley National Laboratory and Harvard's Broad Institute) and the scientists (the Doudna & Zhang teams) who developed the science tools (gene-edited coronavirus) to delivered by the vaccines.

Just for the record, Eldora Ellison, with degrees in biology and law, explained the nuances of both of those to the U.S. Patent Office and the U.S. Court of Appeals (she'd be good for SCOTUS, which could use at least one justice who understands biology and technology) that the editing tool, CRISPR-Cas9 was patent worthy because of Doudna's and Charpentier's bench research and data that proved it could be used in all organisms from bacteria to humans. They were granted 15 patents in the U.S.

By 2020, Doudna and Charpentier had been awarded major patents for their gene editing tool in Britain, China, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and Mexico.

So if it's the scientific patents Biden might lift protections on, it's okay with these scientists, who've never really done what they did for the money, anyway. Even if their institutions might want the money, at least it's clear that Doudna (UCal Berkeley) and Charpentier (U. of Vienna) don't. Besides, they can still get royalties from other countries with their own vaccine production strengths.

Sounds like a no-brainer for Biden because spreading manufacturing and science capacity worldwide is a good thing. It can raise US international leadership capital, too. And it also sounds like the kind of big deal help that's been expected of America.

Just putting out what I've read about, and what Biden's commitment means.