When Intellectual Property Trumped Global Health
A blow-by-blow account of the highly political and contentious negotiations around the TRIPS Waiver proposal at the World Trade Organization (WTO) between October 2020 and March 2024.
A blow-by-blow account of the highly political and contentious negotiations around the TRIPS Waiver proposal at the World Trade Organization (WTO) between October 2020 and March 2024.
For more than three years, developing countries fought against the inequities in the access to medical products, to address the pandemic of COVID-19. As many as 100 countries, led by South Africa and India, sought to challenge existing rules that protect Intellectual Property (IP), in an attempt to boost manufacturing capacities for medical products during COVID-19. This, they did, at the WTO in Geneva, by seeking to temporarily suspend certain provisions of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) – legal rules that govern intellectual property matters. It is a battle these countries lost in June 2022, after first bringing this bold proposal to the WTO in October 2020 that directly sought to challenge the monopolies of big pharmaceutical companies on medical products. Many developed countries are home to the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world.
Author
My heart-felt thanks to numerous trade negotiators, activists and scholars who have educated me on this journey. Countless health workers, officials, and experts who have worked tirelessly during the pandemic of COVID-19, have inspired this process.The compilation has been produced at the request of some trade negotiators so that it may serve as a handy reference to review these discussions at the WTO during this period.
Reviews from Readers
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!
(Associate Professor in Intellectual Property Law, London School of Economics and Political Science)
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.
(Director, Knowledge Ecology International)
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.
(Brazilian Mission to the WTO)
The protracted, but unsuccessful negotiations show how the WTO failed in addressing the challenges of COVID-19 that resulted in more than 15 million associated deaths due to the pandemic. So while Even though the “TRIPS Waiver” failed to become a trade policy option at the WTO in the context of health emergencies, it has undoubtedly reset the debate on the role of IP in global health. This updated edition is a compilation of nearly 70 stories that chronicle these negotiations between 2020-2024.
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