Better than a compromise, a third way: Using patent pooling to accelerate access to vaccines and treatments against Covid-19

In the debate on intellectual property rights induced by the Covid-19 pandemic, vaccines and treatments are typically referred to as simple products whose manufacturing specifications need only to be shared in order to increase production capacity and accelerate access to all, more specifically to low-income populations in the developing world. We contribute to this debate by taking into account the fact that the manufacture of innovative vaccines and treatments can involve multiple technologies whose patents are held by several entities. We propose an economic approach that it is more balanced than the polar options – on which the debate has focused – of either maintaining or suspending patents, without being reduced to a simple compromise between these two extremes. This “third way” is grounded in a model for the characterization of the performance of a patent pool mechanism, whose objective is to maximize access to medicinal products by licensing multiple technologies as a bundle to downstream manufacturers. The outcomes of the nonprofit patent pool are compared with those of two benchmark scenarios where either patent holders license their technologies separately, or where a profit-maximizing patent pool is involved. The analysis highlights the positive role that a non-profit organization such as the Medicines Patent Pool can play in the global governance of responses to the pandemic.