US backs Covid-19 vaccine patent waiver plan proposed by India, South Africa
The United States will pursue negotiations at WTO to waive intellectual property for Covid-19 vaccines. This can allow large-scale production in middle-income countries.
President Joe Biden on Wednesday threw his support behind waiving intellectual property rights for COVID-19 vaccines, bowing to mounting pressure from Democratic lawmakers and more than 100 other countries, but angering pharmaceutical companies.
United States Trade Representative Katherine Tai announced the government’s position, amid World Trade Organization talks about a possible temporary waiver of its protections that would allow more manufacturers to produce the life-saving vaccines.
“The Administration believes strongly in intellectual property protections, but in service of ending this pandemic, supports the waiver of those protections for COVID-19 vaccines,” Tai said in a statement.
Experts said the IP waiver proposal should include other interventions going forward. Amid the pandemic, the “widest possible” access to these interventions is limited by production capacity as well as the propensity of high-income countries to acquire “most of the supplies”, Public Health Foundation of India president Prof K Srinath Reddy said. Countries including Canada, South Korea, and Bangladesh have shown interest in making Covid vaccines if they can get a patent waiver, Prof Reddy said.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez gave the idea endorsed by U.S. President Joe Biden this week a guarded welcome, but he immediately added, “We believe it is insufficient. It should be more ambitious.” While the United States has kept a tight lid on exports of American-made vaccines so it can inoculate its own population first, the EU has become the world’s leading provider, allowing about as many doses to go outside the 27-nation bloc as are kept for its 446 million inhabitants.
Many EU nations, however, have demanded a stop to vaccine nationalism and export bans.
