Events

Patents and Pandemics: Is intellectual property law a barrier to global vaccine equity?

Zoom Webinar

Speakers

Luke McDongah

Luke McDongah

Assistant Professor, LSE Law School

Siva Thambisetty

Siva Thambisetty

Associate Professor, LSE Law School

While rich states such as the US, UK and Germany have Covid-19 vaccines in abundance, many low- and middle-income countries are struggling to access vaccines due to scarcity of supply.

 

On the 21st of September 2021 at the United Nations, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres reprimanded the world for this global vaccine inequity, saying: 

"This is a moral indictment of the state of our world. It is an obscenity. We passed the science test. But we are getting an F in Ethics."

In this Convene @ LSE Law launch event, Dr Siva Thambisetty (Associate Professor, LSE Law) and Dr Luke McDonagh (Assistant Professor, LSE Law) analyse the question of whether Intellectual Property (IP) Law is implicated in the problems of insufficient production and unequal distribution of vaccines globally. Dr Thambisetty and Dr McDonagh evaluate the proposal, made by India and South Africa in October 2020, to waive IP rules under TRIPS Agreement to allow more production in the global south. The TRIPS waiver proposal has the support of more than 100 countries, including the US and China, but crucially, not the UK and EU, which continue to block the measure at the WTO. The TRIPS waiver proposal is also opposed by the major pharmaceutical companies that have profited from the vaccine rollout, including Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson (and even AstraZeneca which has operated an ‘at cost’ approach).

In May 2021, Dr Thambisetty and Dr McDonagh’s LSE Working Paper on the TRIPS Waiver proposal was cited by the world’s most prestigious scientific publication, Nature, in an editorial backing the TRIPS Waiver.

In June 2021, Dr Thambisetty and Dr McDonagh spearheaded the publication of an open letter in support of the TRIPS Waiver with signatures from more than 120 Intellectual Property Law scholars from universities including LSE, Oxford, Sciences-Po, EUI, NYU, UCLA, McGill, Sydney, The American University in Cairo, University of Cape Town, the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Jindal Global University, and many more. The Open Letter was publicised in The Times of India and The Independent (UK).

Dr Thambisetty and Dr McDonagh have also written a number of short pieces on this topic for the LSE Covid-19 blog, which are accessible here and here.

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