Suspend Covid-19 patents during the pandemic

Global trade rules impose powerful monopoly rights for big pharma. This artificially restricts supply and sustains high medicine prices allowing big pharma to profit and sell to the highest bidder. Countries with the most money will get Covid-19 vaccines and treatments first, leaving countries in the global south without. This is bad enough during normal times but during a global pandemic, this is simply unacceptable.

The first initiative to address this is Costa Rica and the World Health Organisation’s Covid-19 Technology Access Pool (C-TAP) an initiative where pharmaceutical companies, universities and research institutions can share medical technologies, manufacturing know-how and intellectual property. Across the whole pandemic, only one research institution or company has submitted Covid-19 technology to C-TAP, with pharma companies prioritising monopoly profits and governments refusing to press them.

The second is the proposal from the governments of South Africa and India to temporarily suspend intellectual property rights and trade secret rules during the pandemic so that more manufacturers are able to start producing vaccines, tests and treatments to tackle the virus. To pass, all WTO members need to vote in favour of it and while over 100 countries are supporting it, the UK is one of the few remaining opposers.

We need the UK Government to listen to what the countries on the frontline of the inequity in access to Covid-19 tools are calling for and enable them to make their own vaccines. We have the vaccine because we bought the lion’s share. We can’t now prevent other countries from making their own.