This Article coins and explains the phenomena of IP nationalism. Just as some nations engage in vaccine nationalism by hoarding limited COVID vaccines, so, too, some nations are hoarding critical knowledge and technology by resisting modification of usual IP rules during the pandemic, such as a proposed waiver of international IP obligations. Countries that are home to IP-owning pharmaceutical companies often benefit from strong global IP rights, since that usually improves domestic GDP for IP-intensive products such as drugs. Even nations without strong IP exports may embrace IP nationalism because current international laws provide economic benefits to these countries in terms of increased trade for non-IP goods. As this Article explains, countries that embrace IP nationalism raise incomplete, or affirmatively false arguments asserting that barriers to accessing medicines are primarily caused by non-IP issues, which hides how IP and IP nationalism are nonetheless creating barriers to access.IP nationalism is harmful. Failure to modify traditional IP rights has contributed to inadequate supply of COVID vaccines, which will likely result in more variants that threaten global health and suppress global economic recovery due to disruption of global supply chains. Even outside a pandemic, where IP nationalism could economically benefit countries with IP-intensive exports, it still creates other harms. For example, IP nationalism results in strong global IP rights that often make necessary goods, such as life-saving medicines, unaffordable to many people worldwide. Furthermore, these rights primarily promote innovation that is most profitable, rather than what is most socially desirable. For example, companies are incentivized to pursue and market treatments of questionable utility, such as the newly approved Alzheimer’s drug that may not even be effective, simply because they generate substantial profits. In contrast, vaccines beyond COVID and antibiotics, though desperately needed by all, are generally not pursued due to low profitability.This Article argues that IP for essential treatments such as COVID vaccines should be considered “global public goods” available to all, contrary to beliefs held by supporters of IP nationalism. This would be an admittedly radical, yet necessary change from current norms. First, this could encourage countries to embrace the proposed waiver of international IP rules for COVID treatments. Although waiving traditional IP rights will not immediately increase vaccine supply, it would permit available and interested companies to expand vaccine capacity and create competition that would likely increase supply and lower costs, allowing poorer countries greater access to the vaccine. In addition, recognition of IP covering pandemic treatments as global public goods would help avoid replicating the current vaccine apartheid in subsequent pandemics and begin to counteract well-documented racial and ethnic disparities regarding access to medicines
