 Hello and welcome to Newsclick. Today, we're going to discuss on the COVID-19 issue, the controversy that has crept in about patents, patent protection, and how important it is or it is not. Niti Ayog has given a statement, of course. It has given a statement to say how the government of India has been doing very well on procurement of vaccines in face of the criticism that it has failed and failed quite badly to provide vaccines. One of the points in that 10-point refutation of quote-unquote negativity that is going around on the vaccine issue is that patents are not important. So we have Professor Satyith Ratvita. So I'm going to ask him that we have been discussing this issue for quite some time and the fact that the government of India, along with South Africa, has gone to the World Trade Organization precisely on this point saying patents should be relaxed or not be observed. Patents and other intellectual property rights should not be used to deny knowledge so that we can find the pandemic much better. Satyith, you have looked at the statement, I'm sure, of what Niti Ayog has said. And also we have discussed this about what Mr. Bill Gates had said earlier. There are various similarities to both the statements. Well, certainly, in the first place, the statement from the member health, Niti Ayog, Professor Vinod Paal, is in the form of a piece of political publicity more than a technical claim for two reasons. Number one, when he's responding to a broad criticism about COVID-19 vaccine technologies in the plural and the intellectual property issues involved as restrictions to their widespread manufacturing distribution, what he responds with is an extraordinarily narrow wicket. And so in the first level, he responds by saying, patents are not important. Other forms of intellectual property protection such as trade secrets, such as tricks of the trade and so on and so forth, such as technology assimilation are important. And the second issue that he brings in to narrow this conversation down is in order to give an example, he uses the mRNA technology-based vaccines, namely the NIH Moderna and the BioNTech Pfizer vaccines, which are actually not neither deployed in India, nor are appropriate because of their ultra-low temperature storage requirements for widespread usage in an Indian vaccination campaign. So really, it's a very sort of selective usage of ground to stand on, on which to make a... All right, let me use the word diplomatic response. Or an undiplomatic one because you're really contradicting what your government has gone to WTOF for and then why did the government back this proposal if it didn't think it was important? And second, as you said, he also wants to take a lot of kudos for having forced Bharat BioNTech to share its know-how with three other companies. So he seems to be quite aware of the fact that yes, this is an issue on which they are on a weak wicket because this criticism has been made, including by us, that Bharat BioNTech, why was it given a monopoly by government of India? And therefore, he has to defend that as well. So instead of saying, yes, we made a mistake, but now we are trying to rectify it, he's trying to win brownie points on that. But it's not only restricted to patents and vaccines. In fact, as the Indian proposal, the South African proposal was, it was about other intellectual property rights as well, on which he doesn't want to seem to speak at all. The more important part of it is that it is true that vaccines, of course, are more difficult. It is not just simple formula that you are transferring and so on. But in the case of drugs like remdesivir patents, for instance, now how useful remdesivir is is another issue. As we have discussed, it seems to be useful only in the first five, six days. It shortens maybe the disease by about two days and so on. If you leave that out, the government of India has been pushing remdesivir as something which should be used. In fact, did talk about it being used for critical and seriously ill patients and we made available only to them. So it seems to have a different view of remdesivir. Why they're not bring the patent of remdesivir? Because that is a small molecule and that's something that can be easily broken. The patent, we are within our rights under Indian law, as well as under WHO position, that under pandemic or a health emergency, you could break a patent. So remdesivir from Gilead has a slightly different trajectory for the government of India. Remember that under pressure, Gilead actually agreed to officially allow manufacture and distribution of remdesivir by a bunch of companies, some in India, some elsewhere. So in a sense, the government of India can weasel out of this and say, we've solved that problem. That the price is still quite high if it is going to be used in such large amounts as it is. So the issue of pricing does not really seem to have bothered the government of India particularly deeply at all. He threw out all of this. If you look at how the government of India has approached pricing for vaccines by Bharat Biotech, pricing by the Serum Institute of India, pricing where numbers were thrown about a month and a half back where the government of India would be charged X price. Another price fixed was 40% higher than that for state governments. Another price twice that for the private market and on what basis any of this was decided, how the government of India had in, whether the government of India had any strategy to deal with the issue of pricing of not just vaccines, but of any medications and related products for the COVID-19 pandemic has never been clear. You will note that oxygen and the oxygen supply chain has had a similar hole as far as pricing is concerned. So pricing still remains- Including oxygen concentrations. Including oxygen concentrators in the market. So the government of India's approaches to all of these, the only thing that is consistent about those approaches is that they are piecemeal efforts at local bandits to make it look as though the problem has gone away. So what you're saying is that the fundamental issue about public health, accessibility, availability, price, these have not been government issues till they hit a bottleneck and there is anger and there is a lack of availability even in the market of what are considered to be life-saving drugs, of course, including oxygen. So this is the only time that the government seems to respond. After this goes away, the immediate crisis disappears or is not visible. And Justice Chandrachur had something rather sharp to say about it with respect to, how come the television channel who showed the disposal of bodies in the Ganga have not been filed? Sinusional charges have not been filed against them. Of course, he was basically being critical of such charges being filed. So given that the out-of-sight means that it is sort of out of the mind, seems to be the government approach. Completely. And the other side of that, I would argue is that the inconsistencies in the government's approach to intellectual property at the WTO along with South Africa on the one hand, which is a reasonably consistent argument, as you point out, to wave not simply patent, but a much broader front of intellectual property-related rights and not just for vaccines, but for a whole range of medications and related interventions for the COVID-19 pandemic. If you look at that activity of the government of India, and then if you look at all the examples that we've been discussing within country that the government of India has been doing or not doing, then one is forced into the speculation that that also, the WTO activity also, is a holier than the publicity stunt. And we have the other issue, not other issue, the other example that is there staring us in the face. The government of India has gone to the Supreme Court to oppose a petition which says the patents and other intellectual property rights should be not considered during pandemic. And the government of India's position is exactly identical to Bill Gates and Big Pharma, that what matters is really not patents, but other issues. And we are talking to everybody in the world and we are trying to solve that, so patents doesn't really matter to us. Therefore, what they are saying indirectly, Satyajit, is what you have already said, that the price does not matter as long as it's available to some class of people in India and essentially the middle class support base of the BJP government. And so long as the government has some leverage to take publicity oriented steps as and when bad image makes it necessary to take those. And really, I think that the Supreme Court action that you cite of the government of India is based much more on the government within country wanting to retain discretionary control rather than having the Supreme Court actually lay down as a matter of legal principle during the pandemic of a certain amount of open transparent accessibility of these technologies. And I think that that makes the WTO action and the within country action, the outside country action and the within country action consistent with each other as being driven primarily by the government's deep desire to shape the narrative of its own image. You know, last question Satyajit, that even for argument's sake, if we take Vinod Pal's argument regarding emergency technologies to be correct, just to argument's sake, we can go into it another day in details how correct that formulation itself is even if we take that to be given. But you know, in terms of other technologies for that vaccine production, how much is intellectual property important in the way that Vinod Pal says that it is not important, what matters is just the know-how. Well, let's put it very straightforwardly. The real issue is unless you intervene as an arbitrator, unless the government intervenes and says this intellectual property for this period because of these reasons is now declared open access, no company is going to risk getting into a face-off with another company to get into litigation about these issues, even if what Professor Paul is saying is correct. Number one, number two, by Professor Paul's own argument, it should have been possible for all the people who can grow cell lines and viruses. Cell lines and adenoviruses are being grown by a whole range of people. Growing us at the manufacturing level, as we've discussed earlier, growing a cell line and growing a virus in that cell line is pretty much the same thing, regardless of what the cell line is and what the virus is. So when he says that the reason why Bharat Biotech is now hand-holding a bunch of companies to manufacture the co-vaccine vaccine is because the technology outside patent rights is difficult, is an extraordinarily disingenuous statement. Because clearly all those companies are doing viruses and cell lines. Sorry, Sajid, could you elaborate this a little more? Why is it extraordinary disingenuous? Well, it's disingenuous because all of these companies have been growing viruses in cell lines, such as the Covishield, such as the Sputnik, they've enabled themselves to manufacture all of these. That is the Johnson & Johnson partnership. There's all sorts of viruses grown in cell line technologies that are being manufactured in the country. In fact, that's how oral polio vaccine manufacture has been done in the country for years. So to turn around and say that growing a virus in a cell line is a difficult technology that needs Bharat Biotech to hold other companies' hands. I don't know what else to call it if not disingenuous. Well, unless you use sharper words, that that's the best that you can do to leave Mr. Dr. Paul with some respect. Okay, that actually brings us to the conclusion of this discussion. And what Professor Rath is basically giving us is that the Indian biologics and vaccine manufacturing is quite an old technology in India in the sense we've been doing it now for quite some time. And we have the ability, we are supposed to be the largest producer of vaccines before the pandemic struck in the world in terms of quantity, not in terms of money. And we have at least by government of India's own reckoning, 30 biologic manufacturers who are able to do various things as well as at least 20 vaccine manufacturers. Yes, maybe all of them are not as active as they once upon a time might have been, but at least we have 25 to 30 companies who can do exactly what Professor Rath suggested, that growing cell lines, this is not something which required a Bharat Biotech in the vaccine field, a Johnny come lately if you will. And therefore, this is really obfuscating issues when you say that we have done very well because we've got them to give technology to three companies. Now, interestingly enough, the Sputnik 5 is being manufactured by five companies and there has been no hand-holding by government of India there. So purely in terms of price, market that there is a market for vaccines clearly. And the fact that government of India is not regulating the market, it seems for at least the high-end market, there is profits to be made. So this is really market capitalism that is deciding how and when technology is to be shared. And the government seems to be taking a role that as long as the middle class gets the vaccine, we don't really have to worry too much about the rest. And that also seems to indicate the direction of this government's policies. Of course, we're not discussing the COVID Act today, which still is in English, the interface is English. And though there are some private efforts to make it in other languages, it's still very difficult because a lot of the stuff within the COVID Act is not accessible to such treatment. So there does seem to be a deep concern which the Supreme Court also seems to be sharing about how do the poor access vaccines, how do we access vaccines in rural areas and the discussion on the question of patents and intellectual property. The stand that the Niti Aayog document takes government of India's stand in the Supreme Court does not augur very well for all of this. Thank you very much Satyith for being with us and explaining to us rather arcane details about intellectual property and vaccine dictation. This is all the time we have for NewsClick today. Do keep watching NewsClick and do visit our website.