Dr Luke McDonagh on proposed patent waiver for COVID-19 vaccines


10 May 2021

Luke McDonagh

Dr Luke McDonagh recently appeared on TRT World News discussing the India-South African WTO TRIPS proposal, recently backed by the United States, for an international waiver of patents and trade secrets to help urgently build up manufacturing capacity of COVID-19 vaccines in the global south. Dr McDonagh stated that although public funding and public institutional research have been essential to the development of the Oxford/AstraZeneca and Moderna vaccines, the intellectual property is held privately, which restricts the ability of companies like Canada's Biolyse and Bangladesh's Incepta to obtain essential vaccine licences and technological know-how. What's more, at present wealthy countries have pre-purchased almost the entire world's supply of vaccines for 2021 and early 2022, with the UK recently ordering another 60million Pfizer/BionTech doses. If the status quo continues, much of the world will not be vaccinated until 2023, if ever; meanwhile COVID-19 is ravaging countries such as India, Nepal and Brazil.  Dr McDonagh argued that we must avoid a repeat of the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1990s - then, once treatments became more widely available in the West, the spectre of AIDS faded into the background of news reports, even as the crisis spiralled out of control in African countries. Now, as life the UK and US returns to normal, there is a grave danger that populations in the west will ‘move on’ from COVID, tuning out the depressing news from Asia, Africa and Latin America. As new variants arise, the market incentivises pharma companies to switch to producing new vaccine boosters for the UK, North America and EU to protect against ‘foreign’ variants. Existing global vaccine inequality could feasibly morph into a kind of semi-permanent global COVID apartheid. Dr McDonagh argued that supporting the TRIPS IP waiver offers an opportunity for the United States to work with large pharmaceutical companies to transfer technology to developing countries and work with them on key regulatory and supply issues with the aim of boosting production.

click here to watch the news report and interview in full

Dr McDonagh was also recently quoted in the Independent.