I'm not really interested in those particulars but offered it as possible rationale that isn't there for academic publishing. I don't think patents (or copyrights) should be granted for publicly funded research at all, as it's effectively work-for-hire already owned by the public. But it gets more difficult when public grants are only a minor part of the funding.

It seems like the easy way to solve that would be to not have research where the government funds only a small part. If the government is going to fund it, fund it the whole way.

The alternative has way, way too much potential for rent seeking. You'll get private interests who connive a way to have the government pay to do the hard/uncertain/expensive part while they don't put in their dime until they're already sure it's going to pan out, at which point they swoop in and claim the full IP monopoly to the detriment of the public.

"Easy"? Certainly in biology that would overturn the entire system for drug/treatment discovery. The government is good at funding basic research, and the private sector is good at bringing products to market. There is no clean separation between the two activities.

The government is good at funding research but it doesn't fund FDA trials and neither will anybody else if they aren't provided some incentive to. That's a pretty clean separation.

The second is a completely separate problem from the research. If you have a promising drug that people have been using in other countries for a thousand years but has never been FDA approved, it never gets FDA approved because nobody can patent the prior art so nobody will pay for the drug trials even if no research is required whatsoever.

Two possible solutions are to have the government fund the FDA trials or to give the party who does a temporary monopoly on the drug regardless of patentability. And if two parties offer to fund the trials in exchange for the monopoly, let them bid for the right.