Three Crises and One Waiver.

In general, it is not easy to see why a pharmaceutical company would need a monopoly as an additional incentive to enter into such a risk-free deal. It is even more difficult to understand why this exclusivity should also extend to countries which are too poor for doing any business in the first place. What remains is, once again, ideology: waiving patent protection would have all sorts of disruptive effects and do all sorts of damage to the credibility of the system! Which is probably true, but it’s not entirely self-evident that a bit of disruption would necessarily be a bad thing, is it?