The waiver of COVID-19 vaccine patents: a fairness-based approach

Abstract

Nowadays global inequalities in access to vaccines seem to be a growing problem. Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) have been playing an important role both in causing and worsening them. Firstly, IPRs have promoted a scheme of each-country/each-company negotiation, which clearly has left many low-income countries almost out of vaccine supplies. Several middle-income countries have had to make tremendous efforts, at the expense of reducing the budget for meeting other social needs, to pay for the vaccines as well. Secondly, the COVAX mechanism, which was precisely designed to ensure the availability of vaccines to the Global South, has been severely weakened under this dominant scheme of negotiation. And thirdly, the provided exceptional mechanisms to increase vaccine availability under the current IPR regime do not work in practice because of the many precise conditions that must be fulfilled under that regime. Since under these circumstances many lives can be prematurely lost, the waiver of vaccine IPRs becomes a morally crucial demand.