Glad to share another short piece on the TRIPS waiver discussion, originally published in the Blog of the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung’s (RLS) Geneva office  in April 2022 . Unfortunately this piece has not aged well, as the outcome of the mobilization spear-headed by India and South Africa and shouldered and pushed forward by a wide coalition of civil society groups did not achieve (by far) the desired goals.

Breaking the cycle of profits and patents in a pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic, which brought in its wake so much heartache and turmoil, did not happen in a vacuum, but within already established structures of social inequity and patterns of political imbalance. The development and subsequent procurement of vaccines followed—and continues to follow—a trend whereby the wealthy were the first to access medical technologies, while the rest were forced to wait and hope for the best. A profit-driven biomedical research and development model and the important role that intellectual property (IP) plays in the business strategies of large, transnational pharmaceutical companies were also strong winds for the perfect storm.

Access to health technlogies is often hindered by stringent enforcement of IP rights, COVID-19 pandemic was an example of how  upholding patents and associated monopolies were considered by some as more important than providing access ot life-saving health goods. Picture by Marcelo Leal / Unsplash

Solidarity is never as close and necessary to survival as when a threat, like a pandemic, makes no distinction between border or wealth, and no country would escape unscathed. The response from the international community veered from the hefty words in the early days of the pandemic proclaiming vaccines to be global public goods, to the ensuing confusing multiplication of initiatives with lofty ambitions of global distribution of vaccines. Finally, we settled on the realization that, for the European Union and other pharma-friendly governments, even in such unprecedented times, it would be business as usual when it comes to IP and access to health technologies.