Yes, there is a difference, and it's striking.
For example, despite the pandemic the wealthy countries have voted overwhelmingly against waiving patents on the long-needed vaccine: https://www.msf.org/countries-obstructing-covid-19-patent-wa...
> I don't think the modern medical industry would work without IP law.
No. Modern medical industry preys on IP law.
For example, despite the pandemic the wealthy countries have voted overwhelmingly against waiving patents on the long-needed vaccine
Correct. In modern times, the countries that developed the vaccine are insisting on getting paid for it. In historical times, vaccines didn't exist and everyone died when a pandemic struck.
The reason the countries that developed the vaccines voted against waiving patents is precisely because they believe that IP is required for the modern medical industry to function. The historical alternative to IP law is trade secrets, which is much worse for medicine, which has made its advancements on the back of researchers publishing and sharing their work. And with trade secrets, even assuming that the mRNA research and development necessary had somehow been funded and done entirely in-house since no one would be publishing it, still Pfizer would demand to be paid for its vaccines, and no one could copy them because they wouldn't have told anyone how to make them.
If you don't see an issue with that, then you need to amend the following:
> In historical times, vaccines didn't exist and everyone died when a pandemic struck.
Amendment: now it's the poor countries who die.
> The historical alternative to IP law is trade secrets
Yes, historically it is. But it's shades and shades of possibilities between "you pay, or you die" and "you pay, or you die, but for different reasons"
Are you aware that an effective Oxford COVID vaccine was developed by a university without the pharma industry IP protection and funding? Are you aware that it is being manufactured by multiple pharma companies at-cost?
Believe it or not, quite a few people are motivated to help fellow humans survive a pandemic even if does not create shareholder value or a billion-dollar patent portfolio.
Oxford, their partners AstraZeneca, as well as Johnson & Johnson (the latter two being pharma companies!) have all committed to distributing at cost — but not at a loss. They want to get paid back. The way they're getting paid back is because they can enforce IP law. If anyone could copy them without paying, as the author is proposing, they would not be able to sustain this kind of research.
At cost is very different than not enforcing IP law. IP law is required for "at cost." Otherwise it's distributed at a loss.
https://www.salon.com/2021/01/24/the-hero-biochemist-who-pio...
and now that it's finished it's immediately applicable to all kinds of diseases that currently and historically have generated massive amounts of damage but were also not profitable to prevent. including but not limited to hiv, malaria, and a number of cancers
https://academictimes.com/first-vaccine-to-fully-immunize-ag...
https://www.fiercebiotech.com/research/biontech-ceo-turns-co...
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6525/145
https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/11/moderna-is-developing-thre...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/covid-19-scientist-mrna-cance...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32716975/
https://phys.org/news/2021-02-mrna-vaccine-cancer-immunother...
i would suggest you've simply picked a bad example to make your point but there are quite a lot of bad examples.
medicine is invented because humans don't like to suffer, or see others suffer. property and profit don't have much to do with that beyond being the current framework to get things manufactured and keep researchers from becoming destitute. and they don't seem to be serving that function well.
So what you're saying is... If there had been a profit incentive, they wouldn't have sat on it? That seems like a strong argument for the profit motive: if you make it unprofitable, it doesn't get acted on.
That being said, I actually don't think your claim of "they'd been sitting on the tech for thirty years because it was not profitable" is supported by the Salon article you posted. Instead it says that a young researcher got frequent pushback in the 90s on a possibly-promising, but not fully-developed idea that turned out to be correct, because it was viewed as too novel or as unworkable. And in fact, in the 90s, it actually was unworkable. She didn't figure out how to make it work even theoretically until 2005.
That doesn't mean the pushback was right — although many breakthroughs have gotten pushback before being proven correct. But it's definitely incorrect to claim that it was sat on for thirty years "because it was unprofitable." Thirty years ago it did not work because they hadn't yet discovered the nucleoside modifications necessary for the human immune system not to immediately destroy mRNA vaccines. It wasn't even theoretically possible until 2005. And in less than a decade of proving it was theoretically possible she was hired away from UPenn by BioNTech to work on productionizing her work on mRNA vaccines — which had still never been successfully made before in humans. In less than a decade since, they have made a successful mRNA vaccine for COVID.
So, I guess what I'm saying is, I think the system mostly worked out? It could have been smoother but it does seem to have succeeded.
>So what you're saying is... If there had been a profit incentive, they wouldn't have sat on it? That seems like a strong argument for the profit motive: if you make it unprofitable, it doesn't get acted on.
It's only an argument if you believe not acting on it was a correct decision. I think the multiplicity of mRNA applications that are immediately following now that we’re past the hurdle of the first one, and the huge amount of damage these vaccines and therapies will prevent or mitigate to literally millions of human lives, including preventing countless deaths (malaria alone kills about half a million every year), indicate that this is an extremely beneficial technology that should have been aggressively pursued before a global pandemic forced the issue.
>Instead it says that a young researcher got frequent pushback in the 90s on a possibly-promising, but not fully-developed idea that turned out to be correct, because it was viewed as too novel or as unworkable. And in fact, in the 90s, it actually was unworkable. She didn't figure out how to make it work even theoretically until 2005.
>That doesn't mean the pushback was right — although many breakthroughs have gotten pushback before being proven correct.
Yes, this is bad. The stonewalling of promising treatments that are not fully developed is entirely contrary to the point of medical research. Novelty and difficulty are the kind of problems that resolve into possibility or impossibility only with the application of research and trials. The year 2005 is still early enough to have massively changed many lives, and it may have been sooner if they were not impeded.
>So, I guess what I'm saying is, I think the system mostly worked out? It could have been smoother but it does seem to have succeeded.
It was allowed to succeed only once it became apparent there was no other choice. Capitalism does not get to take credit for being dragged across the finish line by the biggest mass mortality event in decades.
The problem was that the risk-reward calculation was showing that none of the money invested into mRNA vaccines had turned a profit yet, so despite the promise of the technology and the fact that medicine at large would greatly benefit from a single breakthrough vaccine, no single company was willing to put in the investment since they wouldn't reap the full rewards. IP incentivizes selfish behavior, not collective behavior.
Er... I think there's a fairly sizable difference between modern medicine, in which we can develop an effective cure for a pandemic within a year of the pandemic starting, and historical medicine in which the Black Death ravaged countries for years and was never cured, only adapted to after countless lives were lost.
I don't think the modern medical industry would work without IP law. You can maybe first-principles your way to an idea of a way to produce large amounts of novel, working medicine quickly without IP law, but that's at best theorycrafting and doesn't have a whole lot of evidence backing it up AFAIK. I'm not sure how many people would dedicate their lives to coming up with new medicines, funding enormous safety and efficacy trials, and publishing results if anyone could turn around and copy their work after they poured so much into it.
IP law has probably extended too far into software, but I think the argument for its use in medicine is fairly decent.