Representative image. A makeshift health centre for battling the pandemic in SOuth Africa. Image : AP
Barely two months after it agreed to a WTO deal for temporary intellectual property rights (IP) waiver for Covid vaccines, India has restarted its campaign to extend it to other Covid drugs, diagnostics and medical technologies.
Multiple officials told Moneycontrol that they remain confident of securing support from more nations this time around.
The IP waiver for vaccine production was agreed in a WTO meet in June this year, which decided that the trade body will revisit the issue of extending it to other treatments within six months ending December.
"The latest text focuses disproportionately on the use of the compulsory licensing system. This would allow governments to permit the manufacture of vaccines and other medicines without infringement of IP rights during an emergency such as a pandemic," an official said.
He added that India and a large number of nations from the Least Developed Countries bloc see this as being too narrow in scope, and this position has been communicated to the WTO's standing body on the issue.
This is now being focused on by the WTO.
In October 2020, India and South Africa had suggested a temporary suspension of certain parts of the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). Suspending parts of the TRIPS agreement would allow countries to overcome legal challenges posed by patents to ensure the timely provisioning of affordable vaccines.
However, despite nearly two years of negotiations, the WTO's 164-member nations were unable to strike a deal on removing IP rights for all Covid medication. At WTO's 12th Ministerial Conference (MC12) in Geneva, Switzerland, in June this year, they instead agreed on loosening the IP rights regime only for vaccines, leaving out all other treatments, diagnostics, or other Covid-19 technologies.
Even for vaccines, rather than waiving IP protections, the WTO agreed on some clarifications to current 'flexibilities' and a narrow exception to an export restriction on Covid-19 vaccines for the duration of five years.
As IP rights can create barriers to timely access to life-saving health products, the TRIPS agreement includes safeguards known as 'flexibilities' so states can amend their laws and take certain measures to address public health emergencies.
It entails a limited exception for the procedure of using compulsory licensing for the export of Covid-19 vaccines by eligible countries for a duration of five years.
Other nations question the move
While India had consistently pushed for keeping all therapeutics and diagnostic technologies as part of the deal, the final deal would help poor nations access much-needed vaccines, Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal had said.
He had also stressed that the decision on TRIPS at MC12 came out of consistent discussions between India, South Africa, the United States and the European Union.
Other nations are now asking why India has begun a new campaign on the TRIPS issue so quickly after accepting the results of MC12. The original TRIPS proposal had struggled from the start due to staunch opposition from a handful of wealthy nations such as the European Union bloc, Switzerland, Norway and the United Kingdom. Sources said these have again emerged as the main blockers this time as well.
However, a large set of nations along with international organisations such as Médecins Sans Frontières have suggested that more measures are needed to weed out the pandemic in the global South.
This includes suspending IP on Covid-19 medical tools, issuing compulsory licences on key medical technologies to overcome patent barriers and adopting new laws and policies to ensure the disclosure of essential technical information needed to support generic production and supply.
