COVID vaccine patents: What makes them a contentious issue

Patents reward innovation by preventing competitors from simply copying a company's discovery and launching a rival product. Because it often takes a decade to get a drug approved, companies typically end up with about a dozen years of competition-free sales. But drugmakers usually find ways to improve their product or widen its use, and they secure additional patents that can extend their monopoly for another decade or more.

Medicines are incredibly expensive to develop. Most experimental drugs fail at some point during what can be years of laboratory, animal and finally human testing. Averaging in the cost of all those flops, it typically costs more than $1 billion to bring a drug from discovery to regulatory approval. Without the prospect of years of sales without competition, that work is all the more risky.

The Biden administration has been under intense pressure, including from many Democrats in Congress, to get more COVID-19 vaccines to the rest of the world. Support for the waiver idea floated by India and South Africa in October has been growing in other countries while the outbreak worsens in some places, especially India.

That's not entirely clear, but drugmakers and some analysts say waiving their patent rights won't do much to get COVID-19 vaccines to developing countries faster. That's because making the vaccines is far more complex than following a recipe, requiring factories with specialised equipment, highly trained workers and stringent quality control — things that can't be set up quickly.