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Then-US President-elect Joe Biden receives his first dose of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine on Dec. 21, 2020, at the ChristianaCare Hospital in Newark, Delaware. (AFP/Yonhap News)

In an open letter sent to US President Joe Biden on April 14, 175 eminent figures, including former heads of state and Nobel laureates, asked for a temporary suspension of patent rights on COVID-19 vaccines.

They argued that the US pharmaceutical companies’ monopoly on vaccines should be relaxed so that other countries can replicate them. It’s a timely call that comes at a time when vaccine polarization has been intensifying by the day.

Some very prominent figures added their names to the letter, including former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, former French President Francois Hollande, former Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev, and Columbia University professor Joseph Stiglitz. These are people who have left a profound mark on global politics and scholarly research, and their letter should be taken as a considered word of advice for the sake of our coexistence as a human community.

Disparities in the worldwide distribution of COVID-19 vaccines are so profound right now as to render any comparison meaningless. Wealthy countries possess 87 percent of the total volume, while low-income countries have acquired just 0.2 percent.

US companies hold patents on the most widely used vaccine products, with predictions that it will have a surplus of over 300 million doses by late July. In contrast, there are 50 countries where not a single person has been vaccinated yet.

This vaccine polarization has less to do with the expensive monopoly costs of the vaccines than with a shortage of production. As a result, the wealthy countries have paid a premium to hoard vaccines, while the major producers have been barring their exportation. The COVAX project for joint global distribution of vaccines has been reduced to nominal status.

Having vaccines produced simultaneously around the world would be a shortcut to resolve the vaccine selfishness that results from a shortage of doses.

Unless the whole world can overcome COVID-19 together, the global economy’s recovery will end up delayed, and the US will also suffer.

This open letter is both an appeal for equitable vaccine rights and a warning that focusing simply on the gains to a country’s pharmaceutical company will result in a pyrrhic victory. Hopefully, Biden will take this call deeply to heart.

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