The waiver of COVID-19 vaccine patents: a fairness-based approach

ABSTRACT

Nowadays global inequalities in access to vaccines seem to be a growing problem. Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) have been playing an important role both in causing and worsening them. Firstly, IPRs have promoted a scheme of each-country/each-company negotiation, which clearly has left many low-income countries almost out of vaccine supplies. Several middle-income countries have had to make tremendous efforts, at the expense of reducing the budget for meeting other social needs, to pay for the vaccines as well. Secondly, the COVAX mechanism, which was precisely designed to ensure the availability of vaccines to the Global South, has been severely weakened under this dominant scheme of negotiation. And thirdly, the provided exceptional mechanisms to increase vaccine availability under the current IPR regime do not work in practice because of the many precise conditions that must be fulfilled under that regime. Since under these circumstances many lives can be prematurely lost, the waiver of vaccine IPRs becomes a morally crucial demand.

KEYWORDS:

• Waiver
• intellectual property rights
• COVID-19 vaccines
• fairness
• Global South

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Eduardo A. Rueda-Barrera

Eduardo A. Rueda-Barrera is a Member of the International Bioethics Committee UNESCO (since March 2020). He is the President of the Latin-American and Caribbean Network for Higher Education in Bioethics (REDLACEB). He is the Executive Director of the Network for Ethics and Citizenship Education (REDETICA). He is Co-founder and Board Member of the International Network on Biolaw. He is Former Head of the Latin-American Working Group on Political Philosophy at the Latin-American Council of Social Sciences CLACSO (2012-2019). He is Former Director and Associate Professor at the Institute of Bioethics, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (2012–2019). He wasScholar in Residence at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities KWI & Düisburg-Essen, Germany (2010–2011) and Visiting Researcher at Oslo University (2006).