Right now, due to IP law, there is little incentive in any company besides Phizer and Morderna to try to make the tricky lipid wrapping process of mRNA vaccines cheaper, and setting up a factory in places that grant them patent monopolies to try to do that isn't going to be viable.
I think we are talking past each other. Incentive or not, funding or not, making improvements
TAKES TIME. It isn't like you remove the IP restriction, and next week there's a flood of cheap Pfizer-type vaccine on the market! There would likely be
months of spin up time before anyone else can make it at scale at all, and more months before they could actually improve the process, especially because major process change probably requires a new round of testing and certification for use.
If we lifted the IP restriction today, I don't think we'd see much improvement in cost until 2022. If, say, India's current predicament is the motivator, this is not a viable solution.
No, this is what governments do. They set the rules that determine what the legal issues are. And governments determine what lawsuits are allowed.
If you aren't living in a dictatorship, the government has limits. And, at least here, "the government" is not one entity. It is at least three. And one of them has the specific job of checking whether the other two are out of bounds.
There is precident that they can retroactively increase the length of protection under the IP statute, and the US supreme court said "this is completely up to congress".
There's very little legal similarity between broadly extending rights, and cancelling rights to specific items.
We aren't talking about a general change to IP law. We are talking about cancelling IP rights on two specific items. This amounts to the government annexing (some would say, "stealing") Pfizer's and Moderna's property. There are already Constitutional limits on government seizure of property, you know. It is in the 5th Amendment - "...nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
The Congress alone is not going to change the Constitution for the vaccine.
If the US government wants to remove the IP protection from these vaccines, they will have to buy them, at fair market value.