Ambassador Guilherme de Aguiar Patriota
The Permanent Representative of Brazil to the WTO and other economic organizations

I congratulate author Priti Patnaik for shedding light on the TRIPS waiver negotiations for the production of vaccines at the WTO. This well documented story is presented against the backdrop of a COVID19 pandemic of global proportions, which affected the lives of populations everywhere, disrupting the day-to-day business of the world.

The book is a unique account of almost 4 years of multilateral discussions and negotiations. It is meticulous and captures the promises and unfulfilled expectations of a fraught process pitting the interests of private corporations of the health sector against the urgencies of a health emergency of international proportions.

The book demonstrates time has come move the IP system beyond considerations of corporate profits and legal monopolies, in order to make it more responsive to the needs of people during a humanitarian crisis of global proportions.

James Love
Director, Knowledge Ecology International

In October 2020, as the world was rocked with the COVID 19 pandemic, India and South Africa proposed a temporary waiver of several WTO rules on the protection of intellectual property rights. This proposal set off a dramatic and bitter negotiation that resulted in complex agreement in June 2022 for vaccines, and a subsequent failure to extend the agreement to diagnostics and therapeutics, or other countermeasures. Priti Patnaik covered these negotiations from start to finish and provided reports that were perceptive and well sourced, and constitute a wealth of insight into one of the most important battles over intellectual property rights. This book, bringing together nearly 70 of those reports in a single volume, is essential reading for anyone studying not only this negotiation, but the broader struggles to reconcile aspirations to make access to medical inventions more globally equal, with the well-funded and powerful pharmaceutical industry’s lobbying efforts to protect and promote commercial industries. The Geneva Health Files is particularly good at providing perspectives of developing country negotiators and activists, and going deep into many of the most technically complicated and consequential aspects of the negotiation.

Dr Siva Thambisetty
Associate Professor in Intellectual Property Law
London School of Economics and Political Science

This book is a contemporary history of how vaccine inequity unfolded, and gives a blow by blow account of the state and non-state actors who did the most to prevent it and those who let it happen. It is a valuable resource for anyone who wants to study this period in the history of intellectual property and statecraft. It is also a riveting read!

Sangeeta Shashikant
Legal Advisor, Third World Network

It is a very valuable contribution to capture the negotiations and the global movement around it. It is a very important reference for discussions in the WTO on the TRIPS Review.