For nearly two years, progressive activists have lobbied the Biden administration to weaken international patent protections on COVID treatments. The political pressure was immense. And at several points, it seemed like some officials were ready to cave.
But fortunately for American innovation — and patients worldwide — the Biden administration recently rejected these requests. At the World Trade Organization meeting that recently wrapped up in Abu Dhabi, the U.S. delegation refused to lend its support to the proposal, effectively killing it for now.
Let's hope this decision serves as a template for other pending issues that could deal a body blow to our economic development and the well-being of our citizens. The future of America's innovation economy is literally on the line.
The same voices urging the U.S. to give our COVID therapies away are working to undermine a centerpiece of American innovation, the Bayh-Dole Act, which Congress enacted with support from then-Sen. Joe Biden in 1980.
Prior to Bayh-Dole, Washington laid claim to patent rights for all research that received even a penny of federal funding. As such, there was no incentive for businesses to invest the resources necessary to take these discoveries out of the lab and turn them into useful products benefiting the public here and abroad. Less than 5 percent of the 28,000 patents held by federal agencies at the time were ever licensed and not a single new drug was developed when the government took the invention away from its creator.
In response, Sen. Birch Bayh, a Democrat of Indiana, and Sen. Bob Dole, a Kansas Republican, devised a revolutionary new approach.
The Bayh-Dole Act, which I had the honor to help draft, awarded universities and small companies control over federally supported discoveries, allowing them to grant licenses for development. It launched a new era in American innovation, generating some $1.9 trillion in gross industrial output, over 6 million new jobs, 17,000 start-up companies, 126,000 patents and 495,000 inventions.
But last December, a working group within the Biden administration put forward a framework that would gut Bayh-Dole. It permits Washington to "march in" to impose artificial price controls whenever someone feels a product's price is "unreasonable," a completely undefined term.
