Geneva: The World Health Organization on Wednesday strives to convince pharmaceutical companies that the proposal to suspend patent rights in the Covid-19 vaccine is not an offer to “win” their intellectual property rights.
With more than four million dead people and the number tends to reach much higher, the Director General of Tedros Adhanom Ghebreesus said the vaccine maker must be offered incentives in return for a while releasing their rights.
“Of course, we cannot take your property,” Tedros said through a video link from Tokyo at the beginning of a meeting with the World Trade Organization, a pharmaceutical company and global financial institution.
“With so many lives on the phone, profits and patents must come second,” he said, without giving details about the proposed financial incentives.
Overriding intellectual property rights will help fulfill 11 billion vaccine doses that are said to be needed to protect 70 percent of people in each country in mid 2022.
It is the second meeting in Geneva to try to bridge the difference on how to increase the supply of Jab and cut vaccine injustice that sees countries Rich that is eyeing a booster shot while health workers in poor countries leave without.
Of the 1.1 billion doses produced globally in June, “only 1.4 percent went to Africa, which contributed 17 percent of the global population”, Director General of WTO Ngozi Okonjo-Iweal said in his opening speech.
“Only 0.24 percent went to people in low-income countries.
And the two shares declined even further in the first half of July,” he said.
In addition to suspension of patents, obstacles to trade vaccine materials must be removed and the laboratory agreed to transfer their technology, said Tedro.