The U.S. is supporting discussions about waiving vaccine patent rights in order to help increase vaccine production globally as a new wave of coronavirus cases, particularly in India, is causing concern.
U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai said in a statement Wednesday the country would engage in text-based negotiations with the World Trade Organization.
But Tai also tempered expectations, noting that, "Negotiations will take time given the consensus-based nature of the institution and the complexity of the issues involved."
The negotiations center around the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, known informally as the TRIPS Agreement. Both India and South Africa pushed for waivers in October.
Many health and policy experts, however, believe the move, while unprecedented, is unlikely to have any real impact.
"I don't see what this move gets us in terms of getting more vaccines," said Craig Garthwaite, director of health care at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.
Garthwaite told Yahoo Finance it appears more of a symbolic gesture to signal that the U.S. is taking the surge in India seriously.
But if the Biden administration were taking the crisis more seriously, it would have already sent tens of millions of stockpiled AstraZeneca (AZN) doses to India, he said.
The Biden administration has faced stark criticism over its hoarding of AstraZeneca doses, especially after Chief White House Medical Adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci said the U.S. would not need them.
One vaccine expert, Dr. Peter Hotez at Baylor College of Medicine, said the U.S. doses would be a "drop in the bucket" of what India needs.
Manufacturing bottleneck
Experts like bioethicist NYU Langone's Dr. Arthur Caplan say the patent waivers are no more than a red herring, "because no one is going to get a vaccine by next month."
The issue hasn't been the technology, but rather the manufacturing process, Caplan told Yahoo Finance. So a patent waiver and technology transfer is useless, he added.
Pfizer (PFE) CEO Albert Bourla recently told Yahoo Finance that the process to manufacture the vaccine involves 19 countries already — signifying a global effort for sourcing and production— for a technology that didn't exist at scale before the pandemic.
"Right now, the bottleneck is related with the ability to ramp up manufacturing at the levels that the demand is. The issues are with raw materials that are in limited supply. These are highly specialized raw materials ... It's not simple chemicals," Bourla said.
Which is why, even if a company were to get the technology and try to produce more vaccines, they wouldn't be able to sustain regular production, and it would take them at least two years to scale up, Bourla said.
Garthwaite echoed Bourla's comments, noting that making a vaccine, "is not like trying to make a cheesecake."
Meanwhile, Moderna (MRNA) had already voluntarily waived its patent enforcement in October, but so far has had no takers.
Even if it did, CEO Stéphane Bancel told Yahoo Finance that they company doesn't have resources to allocate to bring in a new partner.
"Because we are still a small company, you know Moderna is 1,300 people ... the tech transfer would take resources away this year, to prepare for next year if we were to outsource the technology. That will limit our ability to make as many doses as we can this year," Bancel said.