The TRIPS Waiver: Intellectual Property, Access to Essential Medicines, and the Coronavirus COVID-19

Australian Centre for Health Law Research

QUT Faculty of Business and Law

Friday, 10 December 2021

9:00 am to 5:00 pm

Z1064, Gibson Room, Level 10, Z Block

QUT Gardens Point Campus 

11:20 am – 11:40 am

A TRIPS Waiver for Vaccines? President Joe Biden, Intellectual Property, Access to Essential Medicines, and the Coronavirus COVID-19

Professor Matthew Rimmer (QUT)

Abstract

After the ‘America First’ approach taken by the Trump administration, Progressive Democrats pressed the Biden Administration to offer support for the TRIPS Waiver. In the Senate, former Presidential candidates Senator Bernie Sanders (Vermont) and Senator Elizabeth Warren (Massachusetts) – and other leading progressive Democrats - were champions of a TRIPS Waiver.    Sanders and his colleagues pleaded with President Joe Biden: ‘Your Administration has the opportunity to reverse the damage done by the Trump Administration to our nation’s global reputation and restore America’s public health leadership on the world stage’.  

After much deliberation, the new Biden Administration has agreed to support a version of the TRIPS Waiver, which is focused on vaccines. The United States Trade Representative Ambassador Katherine Tai commented upon the decision:

This is a global health crisis, and the extraordinary circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic call for extraordinary measures.  The Administration believes strongly in intellectual property protections, but in service of ending this pandemic, supports the waiver of those protections for COVID-19 vaccines. 

Katharine Tai insisted: ‘The Administration’s aim is to get as many safe and effective vaccines to as many people as fast as possible.’  She observed: ‘As our vaccine supply for the American people is secured, the Administration will continue to ramp up its efforts – working with the private sector and all possible partners – to expand vaccine manufacturing and distribution’.  The Ambassador also said that the United States administration ‘will also work to increase the raw materials needed to produce those vaccines.’  Subsequently, Katherine Tai has also been promoting a ‘peace clause’ to resolve conflicts over intellectual property and access to essential medicines during the COVID-19 crisis.

There were a number of countries who followed the leadership of the United States on the TRIPS Waiver. After previously being non-committal on the topic, Jacinda Ardern’s New Zealand Government said that it would support a TRIPS Waiver for vaccines.  After further debate, Scott Morrison’s Australian Government ended its equivocation on the TRIPS Waiver, and agreed to support Biden’s proposal for a TRIPS waiver for vaccines.

In October 2021, Senator Brian Schatz – a Democrat from Hawaii - led a bipartisan group of 14 Senators calling on President Joe Biden to strengthen United States leadership on global vaccination and efforts to fight the COVID-19 pandemic: ‘We are deeply concerned about the inequitable access to these vaccines and other essential supplies across the world and what that means for more avoidable infections, deaths, disruption to the global economy, and the risk of new variants.’ The Senators urged President Biden ‘to do more to lead global efforts to end this pandemic and increase global vaccine access’. The politicians also asked the President ‘to place a stronger focus on development of and access to COVID-19 diagnostics and treatments and strengthening health systems worldwide.’ The group of Senators stressed that ‘more significant U.S. leadership, urgency, and accountability is essential for a more effective global response to the pandemic.’

Biography

Dr Matthew Rimmer is a Professor in Intellectual Property and Innovation Law at the Faculty of Business and Law, at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT). He has published widely on copyright law and information technology, patent law and biotechnology, access to medicines, plain packaging of tobacco products, intellectual property and climate change, Indigenous Intellectual Property, and intellectual property and trade. He is undertaking research on intellectual property and 3D printing; the regulation of robotics and artificial intelligence; and intellectual property and public health (particularly looking at the coronavirus COVID-19). His work is archived at QUT ePrints, SSRN Abstracts, Bepress Selected Works, and Open Science Framework.