This week, 19 House Ways and Means Committee members wrote to President Biden opposing broadening the pandemic-era waiver on intellectual property protections for COVID-19 vaccines. Despite evidence that the waiver failed to foster developing countries’ access to these vaccines, left serious supply-chain deficits unresolved and threatened future drug development and innovation, the Biden administration and World Trade Organization are contemplating extending it to include COVID-19 diagnostic tools and therapeutics. Undermining pharma giants and blaming them for excessive profits off patented medicines — even as these companies benefit from billions in public contracts and government-authorized liability waivers — has a lot of populist appeal. Unfortunately, fixing the price of intellectual property at zero deters new American drugs from being developed and brought to market, thus jeopardizing the…