This constitutes a global public bad. This knowledge is a good with significant public properties. It is, what economists call, a non-rival good. This means that if I, for example, know-how to treat malaria, I can share this knowledge with you without losing my knowledge about this issue. Your acquisition and consumption of the knowledge does not take anything away from me.
Patents are important as an incentive for the private producers of knowledge.
But nothing bars governments, individually or collectively, to develop complementary mechanisms aimed at making knowledge more public by design. In the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health, for example, we are, among other things, discussing the proposal for a global vaccine-purchasing fund. Further it could be an effective and efficient incentive for private producers of medical knowledge, such as pharmaceutical companies, to focus more on treatments for more poor-specific diseases. But, of course, such an international incentive policy measure as the vaccine-purchasing fund would only be one of the ingredients of addressing present global health challenges. International cooperation is key.