The Biden administration recently announced its support for a proposal before the World Trade Organization that would suspend the intellectual property protections on Covid-19 vaccines as guaranteed by the landmark TRIPS Agreement, a global trade pact that took effect in 1995.

The decision has sparked furious debate, with supporters arguing that the decision will speed the vaccine rollout in developing countries. The reality, however, is that even if enacted, the IP waiver will have zero short-term impact—but could inflict serious, long-term harm on global economic growth. The myopic nature of the Biden administration’s announcement cannot be overstated.

Even if WTO officials decide to waive IP protections at their June meeting, it’ll simply kickstart months of legal negotiations over precisely which drug formulas and technical know-how are undeserving of IP protections. And it’s unthinkable that the Biden administration, or Congress for that matter, would actually force American companies to hand over their most cutting-edge—and closely guarded—secrets.

As a result, the inevitable foot-dragging will cause enormous resentment in developing countries. And that’s the real threat of the waiver—precisely because it won’t accomplish either of its short-term goals of improving vaccine access and facilitating tech transfers from rich countries to developing ones. It’ll strengthen calls for more extreme, anti-IP measures down the road.

Experts overwhelmingly agree that waiving IP protections alone won’t increase vaccine production. That’s because making a shot is far more complicated than just following a recipe, and two of the most effective vaccines are based on cutting-edge discoveries using messenger RNA.

As Moderna Chief Executive Stephane Bancel said on a recent earnings call, “This is a new technology. You cannot go hire people who know how to make the mRNA. Those people don’t exist. And then even if all those things were available, whoever wants to do mRNA vaccines will have to, you know, buy the machine, invent the manufacturing process, invent creation processes and ethical processes, and then they will have to go run a clinical trial, get the data, get the product approved and scale manufacturing. This doesn’t happen in six or 12 or 18 months.”

Anthony Fauci, the president’s chief medical adviser, has echoed that sentiment and emphasized the need for immediate solutions. “Going back and forth, consuming time and lawyers in a legal argument about waivers—that is not the endgame,” he said. “People are dying around the world and we have to get vaccines into their arms in the fastest and most efficient way possible.

Those claiming the waiver poses an immediate, rather than long-term, threat to IP rights also misunderstand what the waiver will—and won’t—do.

The waiver petition itself is more akin to a statement of principle than an actual legal document. In fact, it’s only a few pages long.

As the Office of the United States Trade Representative has said, “Text-based negotiations at the WTO will take time given the consensus-based nature of the institution and the complexity of the issues involved.” The WTO director-general predicts negotiations will last until early December.

That’s a lot of wasted time and effort. The U.S. Trade Representative would be far better off spending the next six months breaking down real trade barriers and helping export our surplus vaccine doses and vaccine ingredients to countries in need.

When this waiver inevitably fails to boost production, supporters won’t meekly back off. No, they will step up their haranguing of the United States for having failed to deliver on its supposed promise. There will be lots of yelling and recrimination, and what the Biden administration surely intended as a relatively toothless show of solidarity will instead end up being seen as just another rich country head fake.

That’s a problem for all of us who deeply care about the state of global IP policy, because the damage will be worse and longer-lasting than a diplomatic donnybrook. The United States worked for many years to ratify TRIPS, and since then has been pushing back on the populist anti-IP agenda and trying to convince the rest of the world that robust IP regimes can deliver economic development over the long run. Now much of that work will be undone in the process of this chaotic, and ultimately fruitless, waiver discussion.