In the most recent example of the difficulty interesting private firms in vaccine development, even after the threat of COVID-19 became apparent, a top official at the U.S. This omission is important because it is far from clear that the current policy menu provides optimal incentives for developing vaccines relative to other health interventions. But this literature on comparative institutional analysis has largely ignored a field of patentable innovation beyond therapeutic drugs: preventative vaccines. 11 For example, it is hard to patent a new lifestyle intervention or an innovation in healthcare quality. 10 But where are the policy discussions around medical innovations that prevent consumers from contracting infections and needing pharmaceuticals in the first place? One problem is that some health interventions cannot be protected through IP law, making it difficult for firms to capture a return on their research investments. These prescription drugs-and ways to reduce their prices-are also the focus of current healthcare policy debates. 9 Most of this literature has focused on a particular class of interventions: therapeutic drugs, including small-molecule drugs and more complex biologic therapeutics. 8Ī growing body of recent legal scholarship has examined the interactions and relative efficacy of these biomedical innovation policies.
6 To address this concern, policymakers have created innovation institutions such as intellectual property (IP) law and direct public spending, 7 which lead to hundreds of billions of dollars spent on global biomedical research each year. But in a competitive market, firms often capture only a small part of this value, leading to underinvestment.
5 Research on new medical technologies to combat these diseases has substantial social benefits.
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national security 4 and a driver of global economic growth. 2 In 2014, infectious diseases killed nearly 150,000 people in the United States, 3 and global health has been recognized as an issue of U.S. Infectious diseases-including HIV, tuberculosis, hepatitis, and malaria-are responsible for a staggering one-quarter of global deaths, and over two-thirds of deaths in children under age five. 1 And COVID-19 is only one of many threats to global health. stock indices and could cause over one million deaths in the United States alone. This problem has been starkly illustrated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has already wiped trillions of dollars of market value from U.S. We also make the case for a large cash prize for any new vaccine made available at low or zero cost.ĭeveloping new interventions to improve global health is of critical humanitarian and economic importance. Most modestly, policymakers should increase direct funding-including no grants and public-private partnerships-and insurance-based market subsidies for vaccine development. We conclude by arguing that innovation policy should address these market distortions by experimenting with larger government-set rewards for vaccine production and use. We explain how both aspects make vaccines less profitable than repeat-purchase treatments, even given comparable IP protection. Two key aspects of vaccines help account for their anemic development pipeline: (1) they are preventatives rather than treatments and (2) they are generally durable goods with long-term effects rather than products purchased repeatedly.
In this article, we argue that the large number of ``missing'' vaccines is likely due to more than lack of scientific opportunities. This neglect has substantial human and financial costs, as vividly illustrated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Compared with pharmaceuticals that treat disease, however, preventative vaccines have received less attention from both biomedical researchers and innovation scholars. Vaccines play a crucial role in improving global public health, with the ability to stem the spread of infectious diseases and the potential to eradicate them completely.
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