Intellectual property rights waiver falls short of expectation at WTO meeting

‘We are disappointed with the inadequate outcome on waiving intellectual property for COVID-19 medical tools that resulted from more than 20 months of deliberations,’ says Medicins Sans Frontieres.

At the close of protracted decisions in Geneva on Friday, India failed to convince other World Trade Organisation (WTO) members to waive intellectual property rights governing the manufacture and export of COVID-19 vaccines, diagnostics and therapeutics. Doing so would have eased production and export from India to other countries that lacked such capacity.

The final text of the agreement only eases access to the making and export of COVID-19 vaccines and notes that member-countries would within six months decide on whether similar concessions can be extended to diagnostics and therapeutics.

“The inability to agree to a real pandemic intellectual property waiver at WTO is a devastating global failure for people the world over,” said Christos Christou, International President of the Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF), “We are disappointed with the inadequate outcome on waiving intellectual property for COVID-19 medical tools that resulted from more than 20 months of deliberations. “

While some wording in the text “mitigated some of the most worrisome elements” of a draft text presented in May 2022, the latest agreement failed overall to offer an effective and meaningful solution to help increase people’s access to needed medical tools during the pandemic, as it did not adequately waive intellectual property on all essential COVID-19 medical tools, and did not apply to all countries, the MSF said in a statement.

The measures outlined in the decision will not address pharmaceutical monopolies or ensure affordable access to lifesaving medical tools and will set a negative precedent for future global health crises and pandemics, their statement underlined. “It is time to prioritise saving lives instead of protecting corporate and political interests.”

Earlier this week, Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal, who led the Indian delegation at the talks, had also publicly expressed disappointment. “Our hope and desire was that this will be the beginning and in six months they will decide over the therapeutics and the diagnostics. I am sorry to share with you that in some bilaterals that I have had with the developed world and some of the countries who are opposing this, in a way, they have almost clearly hinted and indicated that IP rights are extremely important. We are flowing with the wind only because of the international pressure but on diagnostics and therapeutics there is no way we are going to yield. Their hope is to unburden their chest of any guilt today, show the world that we have been so magnanimous today, kick the can down the road for therapeutics and diagnostics which are really now essential,” he remarked. The text of this complete speech was shared by the Press Information Bureau earlier this week.

In October 2020, India and South Africa jointly proposed that the WTO do away with certain provisions of the TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Priority Rights) Agreement for the duration of the pandemic to facilitate access to technologies necessary for the production of vaccines and medicines. Such a waiver will aid scaling up of local production, will be critical in order to ensure wide access to affordable and effective vaccines. Most of these patents are held by pharmaceutical companies in the U.S. and the European Union (EU). The waiver proposal was blocked at the TRIPS Council and the WTO Ministerial Council though there have been several rounds of discussions involving Ministers of several WTO member-countries. In the last year though, nearly 100 countries, including the U.S., have supported the proposal, with the EU being the significant stumbling block.