Pharmaceutical lobby PhRMA sent a letter March 5 to President Joe Biden urging him to reject a proposal that would temporarily waive patent rights for COVID-19 products.
The group said that pharmaceutical companies' intellectual property protections won't prevent COVID-19 treatments and prophylactics from being globally available. It also said that such protections expedite the development of new COVID-19 products and help companies better share their technology and information to increase manufacturing.
"Eliminating those protections would undermine the global response to the pandemic, including ongoing effort to tackle new variants, create confusion that could potentially undermine public confidence in vaccine safety, and create a barrier to information sharing," PhRMA wrote. "Most importantly, eliminating protections would not speed up production."
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