Policy Lessons From Medical Responses to the COVID-19 Crisis

Giovanni Dosi

Intereconomics: Review of European Economic Policy, 2021, vol. 56, issue 6, 337-340

Abstract: Abstract This article discusses the medical/therapeutical responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and their political economy context. First, the very quick development of several vaccines highlights the richness of the basic knowledge waiting for therapeutical exploitation. Such knowledge has largely originated in public or non-profit institutions. Second, symmetrically, there is longer-term evidence that the private sector (essentially big pharma) has decreased its investment in basic research in general and has long been uninterested in vaccines in particular. Only when flooded with an enormous amount of public money did it become eager to undertake applied research, production scale-up and testing. Third, the political economy of the underlying public-private relationship reveals a profound dysfunctionality with the public being unable to determine the rates and direction of innovation, but at the same time confined to the role of payer of first and last resort, with dire consequences for both advanced, and more so developing countries. Fourth, on normative grounds, measures like ad hoc patent waivers are certainly welcome, but this will not address the fundamental challenge, involving a deep reform of the intellectual property rights regimes and their international protection.

Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10272-021-1009-2 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:intere:v:56:y:2021:i:6:d:10.1007_s10272-021-1009-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://link.springer.de/orders.htm

DOI: 10.1007/s10272-021-1009-2

Access Statistics for this article

Intereconomics: Review of European Economic Policy is currently edited by Christian Breuer

More articles in Intereconomics: Review of European Economic Policy from Springer, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().