WASHINGTON • US President Joe Biden's support for a waiver of patent protections for Covid-19 vaccines heads to the World Trade Organisation (WTO), setting the stage for potentially thorny talks over sharing the proprietary know-how needed to boost global supplies of the shots.
"In terms of how soon the WTO can deliver - that literally depends on the WTO members, collectively, being able to deliver," US Trade Representative Katherine Tai said on Wednesday. "The desperate needs our people face in the current pandemic provide these companies with an opportunity to be the heroes they claim to be - and can be," she said at a virtual conference at the WTO.
The European Union and China have signalled a willingness to take part in the negotiations.
"The EU is ready to discuss any proposal that addresses the crisis in an effective and pragmatic manner," European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen told a virtual conference in Florence, Italy, yesterday.
Shares of pharmaceutical companies BioNTech and Moderna fell on Wednesday afternoon as news broke of the Biden administration's decision.
Any final waiver may take weeks to hammer out in the face of opposition from the pharmaceutical industry.
Drugmakers argue that the plan is ineffective and that few countries have the capacity to produce more vaccines even if they knew the formulas. Bio-pharma firms point to limited global supply of the materials needed, and say building new factories with the necessary technology could take years.
"This change in longstanding American policy will not save lives," said Mr Stephen Ubl, the president and chief executive of PhRMA, the biopharma industry's lobbying group. "This decision does nothing to address the real challenges of more shots in arms, including last-mile distribution and limited availability of raw materials."
Dr Craig Garthwaite, a professor of strategy at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, said he worried that the move would "signal that we, at a certain point, will not respect IP if the global health need becomes big enough".
He noted that the vaccines are complex technologies difficult to copy without help from companies that developed them.
"People think you're going to pick up this patent and read it like a cheesecake recipe, and make this awesome cheesecake," he said. "You really want Moderna and Pfizer helping you."
French President Emmanuel Macron has lent support to Mr Biden, saying he is "absolutely in favour" of a global waiver on patent protection for Covid-19 vaccines.
BLOOMBERG, NY TIMES
