A pandemic treaty for equitable global access to medical countermeasures: seven recommendations for sharing intellectual property, know-how and technology

Significant shortcomings in the global response to COVID-19 have revealed a longstanding reality: the current international health and intellectual property (IP) laws and practices fail to deliver equitable access to medical countermeasures (ie, vaccines, therapeutics, diagnostics and personal protective equipment) for global health crises. Since 2020, governments worldwide have spent US$5.6 billion on COVID-19 research and development (R&D) and US$45 billion on advanced purchase agreements.1 Yet, these funding agreements have not enabled the transfer of manufacturing know-how to scale up vaccine production and make access more equal. [...]large parts of the world were left unprotected from the virus, allowing the rise of new variants and prolonging the pandemic for everyone. Two, while the World Trade Organization (WTO) Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights Agreement has policy space to protect public health and to promote access to medicines for all, compliance with the legal texts requires a sophisticated understanding of both IP and trade law, and an ability to resist pressure from trading partners and rights holders.4 Compulsory licensing of patents is a powerful legal tool to deal with patent barriers to access to health technologies, in the absence of voluntary licenses, but have scarcely been used during the COVID-19 pandemic. A critical component is to obtain sufficient rights to ensure that patents, data, know-how and biological resources can be shared as needed to replicate the innovation by qualified entities, subject to appropriate safeguards and conditions, including when appropriate, remuneration.