The US has this week backed a proposal to allow countries to manufacture COVID-19 vaccine doses without needing the agreement of the vaccines’ rights holders. This would be enabled by temporarily waiving intellectual property (IP) protection on all COVID-19 medical products. Removing such protections, the waiver’s proponents argue, will increase the amount of vaccine doses produced globally. This is the theory. But in practice, waiving IP is unlikely to be a short-term solution to increasing vaccine manufacture, argues Anne Moore, senior lecturer in biochemistry and cell biology at University College Cork. Skills, knowledge and equipment will need to be shared and developed at new sites, which takes time, and material shortages are already limiting production.