The Biden administration recently announced its support for a proposal that would force American developers of COVID-19 vaccines to surrender their intellectual property rights to hostile foreign competitors, such as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Of course, the CCP routinely steals Americans’ intellectual property by way of cybercrime, industrial espionage, and forced technology transfers.
It’s hard to imagine a more self-defeating or unjust policy. Indeed, I recently penned an op-ed outlining why the Biden administration must reverse course and protect American developers’ intellectual property from Communist China, which you can read below and here. Additionally, today I asked U.S. Trade Ambassador Katherine Tai if President Biden will protect American technology from being willingly surrendered to the CCP and other belligerent foreign governments, which you can watch below.
Posted by Rep. Devin Nunes
Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine patent waiver would benefit China
The record-breaking development of COVID-19 vaccines is a marvel of modern medicine, American ingenuity, and free enterprise. The vaccines saved thousands of lives, prevented countless sicknesses, and have already come close to ending the pandemic in America.
Since we will surely face another pandemic someday, we should be doing everything in our power to preserve and enhance the innovative environment that facilitated such amazing breakthroughs. Instead, the Biden administration is doing the opposite — it is supporting a waiver proposed at the World Trade Organization that would strip developers of COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics of their intellectual property rights and force them to teach their foreign competitors how to make these groundbreaking products.
The waiver will create obvious disincentives to the fast development of successful future vaccines. Developers will be more reluctant to make fast, huge investments in novel research if they believe, or even suspect, that the U.S. government will place onerous demands on them after they produce reasonably priced vaccines.
Consider the implications with respect to just one nation: China. Ruled by the Communist Party, China is a brutal authoritarian state that seeks to gain international power at the expense of the free world in general and the United States in particular. Unable to compete with American innovation, Beijing conducts a massive program to pilfer American innovation, technology, and trade secrets shamelessly through cybercrime, industrial espionage, infiltration of U.S. higher education institutions, and forced technology transfers from U.S. firms operating in China.
As detailed in the regime’s Made in China 2025 plan, Beijing aims to displace America as the world leader in biotechnology, a goal it pursues by stealing and copying others’ innovations. In fact, last July, the Department of Justice indicted two Chinese nationals for stealing trade secrets and hacking into the computers of, among other victims, U.S. firms working to develop COVID-19 vaccines. But with the Biden waiver, China won’t even have to bother stealing this proprietary information anymore. Instead, President Joe Biden will force the American developers to hand it over.
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