newrepublic | Gates can hardly disguise his contempt for the growing interest in intellectual property barriers. In recent months, as the debate has shifted from the WHO to the WTO, reporters have drawn testy responses from Gates that harken back to his prickly performances before congressional antitrust hearings a quarter-century ago. When a Fast Company reporter raised the issue in February, she described Gates “raising his voice slightly and laughing in frustration,” before snapping, “It’s irritating that this issue comes up here. This isn’t about IP.”
In interview after interview, Gates has dismissed his critics on the issue—who represent the poor majority of the global population—as spoiled children demanding ice cream before dinner. “It’s the classic situation in global health, where the advocates all of a sudden want [the vaccine] for zero dollars and right away,” he told Reuters in late January. Gates has larded the insults with comments that equate state-protected and publicly funded monopolies with the “free market.” “North Korea doesn’t have that many vaccines, as far as we can tell,” he told The New York Times in November. (It is curious that he chose North Korea as an example and not Cuba, a socialist country with an innovative and world-class vaccine development program with multiple Covid-19 vaccine candidates in various stages of testing.)
The closest Gates has come to conceding that vaccine monopolies inhibit production came during a January interview with South Africa’s Mail & Guardian. Asked about the growing intellectual property debate, he responded, “At this point, changing the rules wouldn’t make any additional vaccines available.”
The first implication of “at this point” is that the moment has passed when changing the rules could make a difference. This is a false but debatable claim. The same can’t be said for the second implication, which is that nobody could have possibly foreseen the current supply crisis. Not only were the obstacles posed by intellectual property easily predictable a year ago, there was no lack of people making noise about the urgency of avoiding them. They included much of the global research community, major NGOs with long experience in medicines development and access, and dozens of current and former world leaders and public health experts. In a May 2020 open letter, more than 140 political and civil society leaders called upon governments and companies to begin pooling their intellectual property. “Now is not the time … to leave this massive and moral task to market forces,” they wrote.
Bill Gates’s position on intellectual property was consistent with a lifelong ideological commitment to knowledge monopolies, forged during a vengeful teenage crusade against the open-source programming culture of the 1970s. As it happens, a novel use of one category of intellectual property—copyright, applied to computer code—made Gates the richest man in the world for most of two decades beginning in 1995. That same year, the WTO went into effect, chaining the developing world to intellectual property rules written by a handful of executives from the U.S. pharmaceutical, entertainment, and software industries.
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