Owning the Sun

October 1, 2021

Busy freelance journalist Zaitchik, who has been reporting on COVID-19 for the New Republic, here turns his attention to the larger question of who benefits financially from the creation of lifesaving medicines. With federally funded research having facilitated most major medical breakthroughs since World War II, he asks why the legal rights to these drugs end up with international corporations, which prioritize profits over public health. With perspective dating back to the 19th century; an excerpt focusing on Bill Gates's efforts to block open-science/pooling advocacy was the New Republic's most accessed piece last year.

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December 6, 2021
Journalist Zaitchik (The Gilded Rage) takes readers through the labyrinthine history of medical patents in this expansive study. Zaitchik begins in Renaissance Italy, in which the first attempts at privatizing knowledge were introduced in the form of “royal grants” from princes, and moves through the establishment of the “progress clause” in the U.S. Constitution that gave “authors and inventors” exclusive rights to their discoveries. Zaitchik recaps the Bayh-Dole legislation in 1980, which broadened the scope of patents to include inventions developed using federal funding, and the war fought by the CEO of Pfizer in 1986 against the generic drug market, which ensured U.S. patents could be enforced globally. Zaitchik considers patent “dissenters,” including farmers who fought back against the patenting of common agricultural techniques in the late 19th century, and rounds things out with an outline of the race to find a Covid-19 vaccine (Bill Gates, despite his public image as a virtuous philanthropist, according to the author, worked “to ensure the pandemic response remained in line with the deep ideological commitment to knowledge monopolies”). It’s undoubtedly a dense study, but Zaitchik covers a remarkable amount of ground and never gets lost in the weeds. The result is comprehensive and illuminating. Agent: Kate Garrick, the Karpfinger Agency.

January 15, 2022
A freelance journalist faults the "fundamentally corrupt and unjust system" that allows big pharma and others to hoard scientific knowledge instead of using it for the greatest public good. Zaitchik offers a biting study of the "double protection racket" through which drug companies benefit from government-subsidized research and then use patents to reap unseemly profits from it. Beginning with the Renaissance princes whose "royal grants" amounted to proto-patents, the author gives a dense but clear history of how scientific patents have promoted "monopoly medicine." Zaitchik argues that patents were envisioned by the framers of the Constitution as a two-way social contract for advancing science and "useful arts" but have become a vehicle for turning vital medical knowledge into private intellectual property. That process sped up with the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980, which allowed businesses and universities to retain the rights to knowledge developed with federal funding, and it helped to make possible the "vaccine nationalism" of Operation Warp Speed. Drawing on deep research, Zaitchik knocks the halos off three prominent players in the pandemic: Pfizer (whose CEO fought generic drugs in the 1980s); Moderna (two of whose executives dumped $30 million in stock in a legal but suspiciously timed move after the company announced promising vaccine trial results); and Bill Gates, the focus of a chapter called "Pharma's Best Friend: Bill Gates and Covid-19." The author makes a strong case that Gates tried to undermine the efforts of experts who predicted a global vaccine supply crisis with his insistence that market forces could ensure a fair distribution of vaccines among rich and poor nations, a view that has proved "catastrophically incorrect" given that half the world's population remains unvaccinated against Covid. While big pharma often gets the sole blame for soaring drug prices, this book is a brave and timely reminder that politicians and corporate titans have enabled its excesses. A trenchant study of the dangers of turning medical knowledge into private intellectual property.

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February 1, 2022

Zaitchik's (The Gilded Rage; Common Nonsense) creative title for this book refers to Jonas Salk's response when he was asked whether he would seek a patent for his polio vaccine--this he compared to patenting the sun. The wide-ranging history of the patent and intellectual property system included in the book illustrates that Salk's view was and is very much in the minority. Zaitchik begins with the origins of patents in the reign of Elizabeth I, moves through the founding of the U.S. Patent Office, and then trains his focus on the transformation of "patent medicine" from a racket for con men and hustlers to the billion-dollar industry that exists today. The final chapters of the book revolve around the wrangling, negotiations, and power plays present throughout the development of COVID vaccines that ultimately influenced the ability to produce and distribute them. VERDICT Part history lesson on intellectual property and part damning critique of the private interests that blocked an attempt to subject COVID vaccines to IP restrictions, Zaitchik's book is highly informative and deeply troubling reading. It will appeal to readers concerned with equitable access to medicine and responsible corporate governance.--Sara Holder

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.