Print this article President Joe Biden speaks as he tours a Pfizer manufacturing plant producing the coronavirus vaccine in Kalamazoo, Mich., February 19, 2021. (Tom Brenner /Reuters) The week of May 3: waiving the COVID-19 vaccines’ intellectual-property protections, disappointing jobs numbers, and much, much more. Just in case its tax plans were not evidence enough that the Biden administration has little understanding of the value of incentives, its proposal that intellectual-property protections should be waived in the case of COVID-19 vaccines bolstered the message that no economically productive deed should go unpunished. The New York Timesprovided some background: The United States had been a major holdout at the World Trade Organization over a proposal to suspend some of the world economic body’s intellectual property protections, which could allow drugmakers across the globe access to the closely guarded trade secrets of how the viable vaccines have been made. But President Biden had come under increasing pressure to throw his support behind the proposal, drafted by India and South Africa and backed by many congressional Democrats.