Maverick Citizen: Explainer
Tripped up: All you need to know about the Covid-19 TRIPS waiver and what it may achieve for SA (and what it won’t)
By Franziska Sucker• 11 May 2021
Activists outside Pfizer headquarters in Manhattan, New York demand that US President Joe Biden support the TRIPS waiver, which would lift the intellectual property protection for Covid-19 vaccines.
(Photo: Steven Francis Kong)
A waiver would not be a global answer to the pandemic but would be a step in the right direction. It would remove the legal barriers that prevent cross-border cooperation in generic manufacturing of Covid-19 medical products as well as cross-border manufacturing capacity building – both long-term considerations. In the short and medium term a waiver would facilitate generic export to members in need (with limited and no manufacturing capacity, eg African countries) and simplify and potentially speed up generic production (for those with manufacturing capacity such as India)
Disclosure statement
In 2017-2020, Joel Lexchin received payments for being on a panel at the American Diabetes Association, for talks at the Toronto Reference Library, for writing a brief in an action for side effects of a drug for Michael F. Smith, Lawyer and a second brief on the role of promotion in generating prescriptions for Goodmans LLP and from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research for presenting at a workshop on conflict-of-interest in clinical practice guidelines. He is currently a member of research groups that are receiving money from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council. He is a member of the Foundation Board of Health Action International and the Board of Canadian Doctors for Medicare. He receives royalties from University of Toronto Press and James Lorimer & Co. Ltd. for books he has written.
As much of the world continues to reel under the coronavirus crisis, there is an increasingly frantic scramble for more and more vaccines in countries seeking to protect their people against the disease. One of the possible solutions to the vaccine crunch which is being talked about now, particularly in low and middle-income countries, is a temporary waiver of intellectual property rights for Covid-19 vaccines under the umbrella of the 164-member World Trade Organisation (WTO).
The patent waiver was proposed jointly by India and South Africa at the WTO in October last year to temporarily do away with the provision relating to not only vaccines but all Covid-related medicines and technologies under the agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). Interestingly, there has been no mention as to how long the waiver should be in place. More than 100 countries have so far backed the waiver move.