COVID vaccine donations matter more than waivers, EU leaders say

While humanitarian groups have cheered the Biden administration’s decision to lift patent protections on COVID-19 vaccines, European Union leaders say any benefit from a temporary waiver would take too long to make a real difference.

European leaders voiced increasing scepticism on Friday that a United States proposal to lift patent protections on COVID-19 vaccines would solve the problem of getting shots into the arms of people in poorer countries, with some instead calling for more exports of the doses already being produced. While activists and humanitarian groups have cheered the Biden administration’s decision and urged others to follow suit, European Union leaders are hammering home the message that any benefit from a temporary waiver of intellectual property protections would be long in coming. Instead, they have taken the US, in particular, to task for not sharing more vaccines with the rest of the world.