Earl E. Bird

After thinking about this some more, part of the reason I'm having trouble with the point on IP waivers being made in this post is that it assumes that one thing will be done (in this case, IP waivers), and that everything else will remain the same. But that's not usually how things work out. Every change we make has follow-on effects, which also have follow-on effects, and so on. If IP waivers cause biotech companies to not be incentivized to create vaccines, but if there is a huge need for vaccines, public funding will take the place of IP incentives. This could end up being a huge improvement over the current incentives, which prioritize the most profitable investments, rather than the most needed ones.

Since black people are about five times as likely to be stopped by the police (and thus probably more likely to have close contact with police officers), and since there seems to be more vaccine hesitancy among black people than white people, it is indeed likely that this will affect black people more than it will affect white people.

I also think that, even assuming that the US was unilaterally "confiscating" these companies' IP, it's not clear what the actual impact on future innovation would be, since:

1. This is clearly a unique situation. It's unlikely that these corporations would make the assumption that all future IP would also be "confiscated"
2. Even if they made that assumption, what are they supposed to do? Stop investing in future developments, and slowly go out of business? A much better option would be to just not get any IP protections at all, but instead rely on trade secrets to protect investments. This would probably end in a more competitive market; since the consensus among economists who specifically do research on this topic seems to be that IP laws hurt more than they help.

It should also be noted that these corporations profit from voided IP protections, since they all also produce generic medicinal products.