Responding to news that governments at the World Trade Organization (WTO) have agreed a deal on patents for COVID-19
vaccines in developing countries, Max Lawson, Co-Chair of the People’s Vaccine Alliance and Head of Inequality Policy at Oxfam, said:
“This is absolutely not the broad intellectual property waiver the world desperately needs to ensure access to vaccines
and treatments for everyone, everywhere. The EU, UK, US, and Switzerland blocked that text. This so-called compromise
largely reiterates developing countries’ existing rights to override patents in certain circumstances. And it tries to
restrict even that limited right to countries which do not already have capacity to produce COVID-19 vaccines. Put
simply, it is a technocratic fudge aimed at saving reputations, not lives.
“The conduct of rich countries at the WTO has been utterly shameful. The EU has blocked anything that resembles a
meaningful intellectual property waiver. The UK and Switzerland have used negotiations to twist the knife and make any
text even worse. And the US has sat silently in negotiations with red lines designed to limit the impact of any
agreement.
“South Africa and India have led a twenty month fight for the rights of developing countries to manufacture and access
vaccines, tests, and treatments. It is disgraceful that rich countries have prevented the WTO from delivering a
meaningful agreement on vaccines and have dodged their responsibility to take action on treatments while people die
without them.
“There are some worrying new obligations in this text that could actually make it harder for countries to access
vaccines in a pandemic. We hope that developing countries will now take bolder action to exercise their rights to
override vaccine intellectual property rules and, if necessary, circumvent them to save lives.”