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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | The AIDS fight offers a COVID vaccine patent pathway -Murphy Halliburton

The AIDS fight offers a COVID vaccine patent pathway -Murphy Halliburton

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published Published on May 22, 2021   modified Modified on May 22, 2021

-The Hindu

There are recognised ways to overcome the patents hurdle, ensuring social justice and boosting the COVID-19 battle

In order to achieve global herd immunity and prevent new strains of COVID-19 from emerging, possibly for years to come, vaccines need to be affordable and available in massive quantities throughout the globe. This can happen through patent owners voluntarily licensing their products to other companies, especially Indian producers who are experienced at mass-producing low-cost medications. This can also be done by temporarily suspending patent rights for COVID vaccines, an option that is being pursued by India and South Africa through the World Trade Organization (WTO) and one that is legal in the event of a public health emergency, according to that organisation’s own rules. One way or the other, India and the world need several Indian pharmaceutical companies, not just the Serum Institute of India, to gain the right to make these vaccines if we are going to see an end to this pandemic any time soon.

Turning point in the HIV fight

Decades of struggles over patent rights and access to medications for HIV/AIDS demonstrate that it is possible to navigate patent restrictions using something called “voluntary licenses” where a patent holder decides to license a product to other producers. The United Nations’ Medicines Patent Pool and the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 Technology Access Pool are important tools in an effort to promote voluntary licensing for COVID products that so far have been ignored by pharmaceutical producers. Sharing patent rights through voluntary licensing would need to involve India’s large pharmaceutical sector whose production capacity helped make treatments for AIDS more affordable in low-income countries and helped mitigate that pandemic.

In the 1990s, the WTO began implementing a global intellectual property regime known as the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights agreement, or TRIPS. While TRIPS alarmed public health experts because of its potential to raise the price of essential medicines, voluntary licensing agreements between pharmaceutical producers were able to bring down the price of AIDS medications despite the TRIPS regulations.

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The Hindu, 22 May, 2021, https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/the-aids-fight-offers-a-covid-vaccine-patent-pathway/article34617907.ece?homepage=true


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