Rather than a World Trade Organization (WTO) patent waiver, COVID vaccine equity requires improvements to manufacturing and distribution of vaccines in the Global South and compulsory licensing mechanisms, according to a statement by ALLEA, the European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities.
They state that the low level of COVID vaccination in the Global South is ethically unacceptable and risks prolonging the pandemic. At the end of 2021, access to Covid-19 vaccines is still a priority. Only 5.9 % of people in low-income countries have received at least one dose (on 29 November 2021, compared with 0.3% on 14 April), with numbers in Africa remaining very low, save for Morocco. The patent waiver being discussed within the WTO since 2020 will not solve these vaccination bottlenecks in the short-term. For instance, the waiver as proposed by South Africa and India would in practice require unanimity between the 164 WTO Members to be adopted – to achieve this in practice would simply delay the waiver until after the pandemic.
Rather, measures should be undertaken to accelerate local manufacturing and distribution of vaccines in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), ramp up investment in vaccination campaigns, and facilitate the compulsory licensing of patents and knowledge transfer.
In particular, the statement advocates for (i) practical measures that could accelerate the production, export, distribution, and administration of vaccines worldwide and ii) an international mechanism affording additional scrutiny of the manufacturing bottlenecks combined with new measures in the intellectual property (IP) framework such as flexibility for the compulsory licensing of patents.
According to the experts, the current co-sponsored waiver proposal at the WTO is “not well-tailored to the urgent vaccine problem” and needs additional national legislation to have any practical effect. A WTO waiver would only remove the obligation for WTO Member States to grant IP protection, but would not ensure that stakeholders can effectively benefit from the invention and related know-how.
“A waiver (in the sense of the co-sponsored proposal at the WTO) of IP protection, including of trade secrets, would never make this know how publicly accessible, but only remove the possibility for companies enjoying confidentiality protection to sue for trade secret infringement”, the experts argued.
Other IPR measures need to be considered instead, with the WTO waiver debate raising other IP fixes that are needed in the field of health. The WTO rules on compulsory licensing of health-related patents should be amended. Important adjustments to patents and trade secret protections should also be adopted by the EU, its Member States, and other countries. In particular, improved procedures and institutional design should help to streamline the process for compulsory licensing on pharmaceutical products, including vaccines.
Source: ALLEA
