Capitalizing an epidemic: Does voluntary license stabilizes access to patented vaccines and public health crisis?

Abstract

AbstractThe spread of SARS‐CoV‐2 has paused the entire commercial sector except for the pharmaceutical domain. This highly contagious virus has kept the pharmaceutical domain, and publicly funded research institutions dynamically occupied in the R&D process to achieve the vaccine for the treatment and eradication of the COVID‐19 virus. The key issues are not the incentives for R&D but the accessibility of such vaccines at the ground level amidst voluntary licensing, elliptically, the dilemma encompassing innovations, patent rights, accessibility, and public health emergencies amidst stakeholders with contrasting interests. The voluntary licensing approach promotes a balance between native generic manufactures and international groups yearning to protect their intellectual property (IP) rights while boosting goodwill via better accessibility of such medicine, and concurrently providing pharmaceutical giants a constructive business strategy to set foot in developing markets. Patent rights and more significantly voluntary licensing might have a consequential impact on the public healthcare niche as it would facilitate a grip of patent holders concerning private governance activities over IP‐protected technologies. This paper provides an overview of voluntary licensing and its implications on vaccines in the pandemic.