In fact, it seems like nothing much happened, unfortunately, as you just stated. We were really disappointed in the outcome that was reached. You know, the negotiations for this particular decision have been taking place since May, but for the last 18 months the World Trade Organization has been discussing a proposal by India and South Africa to completely suspend intellectual property rights on the full range of COVID-19 medical tools. And that’s, in fact, not what was discussed at all in Geneva last week. And in fact, a bloc of rich countries in the EU, the United States, U.K. and Switzerland, amongst others, led the charge, in essence, to arrive at this watered-down decision, which, in fact, doesn’t waive any intellectual property rights and, in our opinion, you know, may ultimately cause more damage than good.
we’ve argued that it’s a weak deal because it’s not a waiver. It’s not the waiver that was proposed by South Africa and India. It only deals with vaccines, and it only deals with patents. And, in fact, the entire deal is more about a summary of what you would have to do if you decide to manufacture vaccines and export them. So it deals quite significantly with export rights and who should be opting in and who should be opting out of the deal, doesn’t deal with all the other elements of intellectual property like copyright and trade secrets or the recipes and the knowledge that we actually need to scale up manufacturing. And it doesn’t even deal with treatment and diagnostics in the middle of 2022.
— source democracynow.org | Jun 23, 2022