Tournament: Little Rock Central | Round: 1 | Opponent: JPG Dozda | Judge: Adicherla, Shreyas
Patrick Kilbride, 12-9-2020, "Calls for WTO to Suspend IP Rights for Vaccine Innovation Would Jeopardize Incredible Progress," IPWatchdog, https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2020/12/09/calls-wto-suspend-ip-rights-vaccine-innovation-jeopardize-incredible-progress/id=128085/
But what is even more important than what’s possible under a robust intellectual property system, is what’s impossible without it. First: continued research and development. It takes decades and often costs billions to bring a new medicine to market. The timeline for COVID-19 vaccine deployment in 2020 has been nothing short of miraculous – and it would have been impossible absent the decades of research investment it built upon. Additionally, for every 25,000 therapeutic compounds that start in the laboratory, 25 make it to clinical trial, 5 make it to market, and only one recoups the cost invested. Intellectual property protections signal to innovators and investors that shouldering this risk is worth it. Intellectual property protections promise that new ideas have tangible value. Without that signal and that promise, the business of innovation isn’t viable. Second: build-on innovation. The intellectual property system – specifically, the patent system – promotes the public disclosure of inventions, which encourages further discovery. When an innovator applies for a patent, they’re required to describe how their invention works and what it can do. The innovator’s discovery is respected for a period before transitioning into the public domain. That means, every time a patent is granted, the global innovation knowledge pool gets a little bigger. On the flip side, if countries quit respecting patents, the global innovation information pool dries up, knowledge contracts and the amount of private investment in RandD will inevitably shrink. Finally: A safe, legitimate marketplace. Patents facilitate a market for innovative medicines, throughout the development stage, as well as in commercialization. Licensing arrangements facilitate the types of collaborations that have proven so successful in 2020; they also ensure that third-party manufacturers are making, using, and selling COVID-19 solutions safely and ethically. Without it, counterfeiters and other bad actors could put shoddy, unreliable, and downright dangerous dupes on the market, all the while marketing them as legitimate products. It’s literally a matter of life and death: Thousands, if not millions, of people die each year at the hands of counterfeit drugs.