Protecting Public Health through Technology Transfer: The Unfulfilled Promise of the TRIPS Agreement

The scrambling for access to COVID-19 vaccines by developing countries has reignited the debate on the World Trade Organization's (WTO) Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement) and its effects on public health and health-related rights. In such debates, the TRIPS Agreement is often cast as "the big evil." There is no denying that when the TRIPS Agreement was adopted in 1995, it ushered in intellectual property (IP) norms and standards derived from wealthy nations with robust industries. These norms and standards were suitable to expand the global protection of the IP assets of these industries. However, TRIPS was ill-suited to the needs of developing and least-developed nations, representing the majority of the WTO's membership. In 2002, the World Bank estimated that the implementation of the TRIPS Agreement by developing countries would amount to more than US$20 billion in income transfers from developing countries to technology-creating nations particularly the United States, Germany, and France.-The promised trade-off from the TRIPS Agreement was that the higher levels of IP protection would lead to technology transfers from high-income to lower-income countries and that the benefits of this technology transfer, creating research and industrial activities in lower-income countries, would outweigh the cost of expanded levels of IP protection.