TRIPS waiver essential to meet global vaccine demand: Experts

A temporary waiver of the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights Agreement for the Covid-19 vaccine is essential to meet the number of doses of vaccinations required to achieve global herd immunity, according to a joint article.

Parsa Erfani, Agnes Binagwaho, Mohamed Juldeh Jalloh, Prof Muhammad Yunus, Paul Farmer, and Vanessa Kerry have written the article published in the British Medical Journal recently.

The titled of the article is ‘Intellectual property waiver for Covid-19 vaccines will advance global health equity’ focused on the importance of a temporary IP waiver to reach global needs, said the Yunus Centre on Monday.

The article stated the current vaccination figures show that the percentages of people in high-income countries who have been vaccinated is 46 per cent while 20 per cent in middle-income countries and 0.9 per cent in low-income countries.

This is largely due to the acquisition of doses by high-income countries in large quantities as well as production is restricted to a small number of manufacturers, it reads.

The article states that a clear scarcity of supply exists, and this exists due to intellectual property (IP) protection which currently restricts production and access to the vaccines.

Donor based models have not worked in reaching the highest risk population, due to underfunding and vaccine scarcity, said the Yunus Centre quoting the article.

To meet the current global needs it is necessary to also have production of vaccines in LMICs, it said.

A temporary waiver, will enable more manufacturers and result in yielding doses faster, according to the article.

The arguments against the waiver include, that LMICs have limited capacity to produce such complex vaccines, that a move like this could stifle further biomedical innovation and funding into such research, as there would be no return on investment and cause bottlenecks in the supply chain. However, data does not support this.

Sharing of the technology and the technical know-how is crucial in helping to expand production to meet global needs, according to the article.

There are LMICs that have production capacity for complex Covid-19 vaccine production. With the IP waiver, and sharing of all vaccine-related knowledge and technology as well as planning, bottlenecks in raw materials can be avoided.

The waiver would be temporary thus only affecting the Covid-19 vaccine, and many of the costs of research and development have been recouped.

There has also been publicly funded research that laid the groundwork for the vaccine. Keeping all things in mind, this seems to be the best way forward in meeting global needs.

Now, it is important that countries need to agree on a temporary IP waiver, in order to ensure the world's population can receive the vaccinations, achieving global herd immunity and facilitating global health equity.