Inventiveness criterion
Article reserved for subscribers
Médecins du monde is filing a case against Pfizer to challenge the patents for its coronavirus vaccine. Chloé Forette, member of the NGO, explains why intellectual property policies slow down the deployment of the remedy in the world.
A new front is opening up against the monopoly of vaccines against Covid-19. Faced with the slowness of international negotiations for the lifting of patents, Doctors of the World (MDM) decided to attack the latter on the merits. Time is running out: this intellectual property policy is slowing the deployment of vaccines around the world and costing billions to Western countries. The association therefore files an appeal with the European Patent Office (EPO) against the file of BioNTech, this German start-up which developed the vaccine, then bought by Pfizer and called Comirnaty in the trade. It is the most widely used serum in Europe. Chloé Forette, drug pricing and health systems advocacy referent at MDM, details with Release the arguments of the association and highlights the debates raised by this subject.
In the preamble, it recalls that patents make it possible to grant a monopoly to an industrialist on the marketing of a product. Vaccines against Covid are protected by several patents. These were very quickly filed in the spring of 2021, but the vaccines arrived on the market at the end of 2021, i.e. before the EPO had finished examining the files. Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna having filed theirs first, no one has dared to compete with them, but if their patents are rejected, the market would become more open.
According to you, the patents filed by BioNTech for its vaccine against Covi…