Labour peer says vaccine IP should be waived during a pandemic
UK politicians are proposing that the country waive UK registered IP related to vaccines and treatments in the event of a pandemic.
The amendment, proposed by Labour peer Baroness Chakrabarti, would see the UK Health and Care Bill altered to include a new clause that would waive patents, industrial designs, and other IP related to vaccines, medicines, diagnostics and other materials in the event of the World Trade Organisation declaring a pandemic.
The amendment is sponsored by fellow Labour peers Baroness Lawrence of Clarendon, Lord Boateng and Green Party peer Baroness Bennet of Manor Castle.
The clause will see “a proportionate share” of IP resulting from public funding—including those related to research, clinical data, and manufacturing—subject to Crown ownership and openly licensed.
According to reporting from The Guardian, the proposed amendment is expected to be debated at the House of Lords this week.
In a quote sourced by the paper, Chakrabarti said: “We are failing because of insufficient sharing of our vaccine supply and not allowing generic vaccine production in the global south.”
TRIPS waiver support
The Baroness has been a vocal supporter of waiving Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement rights for COVID-19 related treatments.
In spoken contributions to UK parliament, Chakrabarti said: “Given that most of the initial investment in the world’s major vaccines, including here in the UK, came from public and philanthropic sources, not to allow a narrow and time-limited vaccine patent waiver at the WTO so that the poorer nations of the global south can speed up vaccination and defeat variants, is as incomprehensible a decision as any I can think of. Future generations will have little forgiveness for it, let alone respect.”
Chakrabarti holds that due to the substantial public funding many of the drug makers received to develop the vaccines, IP related to the treatments should be owned by the government or via open licences.
“I believe in intellectual property as well, but, given that the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine was 97% publicly funded, and that it is a similar story for Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech in the US and Germany, it seems to me that there is a very strong argument that there should have been government-owned patents, or indeed creative commons, in the first place,” she said.
COVID and IP
Suspending IP provisions related to COVID-19 vaccines and treatments was a topic first floated before the World Trade Organisation in October 2020. But despite several examples of high-profile support for the waiver, the WTO has failed to reach a consensus on the issue.
Last week, an independent attorney at James Pooley PLC, and Sven Bostyn, associate professor of biomedical innovation law at the University of Copenhagen, sat down with LSPN Connect to discuss why the IP waiver would do little to improve global vaccine distribution.
Pooley said: “It takes billions and billions of risk capital to develop these drugs. Asking private industry to do that once you’ve taken away those rights is going to be extremely difficult. Where’s the investment income going to come from when it can’t be reliably recovered in some way?”
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