Securing voluntary license to produce Covid-19 vaccine is not enough to boost the production of much-needed doses amid the pandemic, a humanitarian medical group said.
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), or Doctors Without Borders, said in a virtual briefing on Thursday that intellectual property (IP) holders could put in place some restrictions preventing the grant of voluntary license.
In securing a voluntary license, the patent holder is authorizing a generic drug company to produce patented articles, such as the Covid-19 doses.
“Voluntary licensing is inherently limited because, again, the decision-making power is up to the company,” MSF Legal Advisor Yuan Qiong Hu said.
Hu said that the IP-holding company can dictate who they want to work with, set the terms and conditions for the licensing, choose which countries are allowed to supply and decide which IP are only allowed for production at certain price tag.
“All of these controlling power remains with originator. But in a pandemic, we want to open up this space…” she said.
She shared that MSF has been reaching out to the pharmaceutical industry since the onset of pandemic to support the initiative on open sharing of technology and voluntary licensing.
But she lamented that major players expressed some reluctance.
“[W]e see very little progress, especially lacking of willingness and action from major multinational pharmaceutical industry who are now holding the essential technologies that are critical to scale up production and diversify supply of vaccines and other essential medical tools, including treatment and diagnostics,” Hu explained.
With this, Hu said that the group has called for the temporary waiver of the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement in the World Trade Organization (WTO) and has been negotiating on the matter for over seven months now.
It is a multilateral accord on IP covering copyright and related rights, trademarks, geographical indications, industrial designs and patents, among others. The said agreement sets the minimum standards of IP protection, enumerates enforcement procedures and covers dispute settlement.
Waiving the TRIPS agreement, she said, could prevent the exclusivity and monopoly of the Covid-19 vaccine.
“[There’s] a lot of…available capacity in developing countries who can help with the expanding global production and diversify supply so that we wouldn’t need to wait for the vertical control of production supply from big industry to make sure access at global level would be equitable and timely,” Hu said.
While over 100 countries have expressed support towards the waiver proposal, the MSF official noted that major economies such as Switzerland, European Union, Japan and the United Kingdom have yet to “come forward to really sit down and talk about this option.”
Still, Hu welcomed the recent changing of stance by the United States who backed the IP waiver on Covid-19 vaccines recently. This led to more countries showing willingness to join the call, she added.
Trade Secretary Ramon Lopez earlier told the BusinessMirror that other big economies are likely to join the US in supporting the proposal to scrap the patent protection on the Covid-19 doses.
“US has set a good example and it can influence others as well, in the spirit of saving humanity from the tragedy of this pandemic,” he said, noting this could address the global shortage of vaccines.
The Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines (IPOPHL), meanwhile, warned that other economies, like Germany, will flag the potential damage of doing so to the health innovation and point out that supply chain should be the concern instead.
“New supporters even acknowledged that the waiver will not be a ticket that guarantees supplies to developing countries and that setting patent-waiving measures in place and seeing results would take time that might not be with the times of the Covid-19 pandemic,” IPOPHL Director General Rowel Barba told this newspaper.
South Africa and India earlier submitted the IP waiver proposal to the WTO requesting to remove the copy right, industrial designs, patents and undisclosed information under the TRIPS agreement until majority of the world population has immunity.