India trips on its patent waiver proposal

Delhi has not backed its WTO proposal to suspend intellectual property rights on COVID-19 pharma products with robust action

- LATHA JISHNU

THERE ARE signs of a stirring at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to reinforce the battle against the COVID-19 pandemic. Fifteen long months after South Africa and India first proposed that WTO keep in abeyance its TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) agreement that protects intellectual property rights (IPRS) SO medicines, vaccines and diagnostics to fight the SARS-COV-2 virus can be manufactured freely, the body suddenly appears to be in a hurry to arrive at a deal on the contentious plan.

In mid-January, WTO's general council held a meeting in response to India's call to hold a virtual ministerial conference to discuss the waiver. This could have been a reaction to the rapid spread of the Omicron variant of the virus and its subsets across the US, Europe and India. Reports from Brussels speak of secret parleys in Geneva involving the EU, US, India and South Africa at a senior political level, to thrash out a deal on the proposal that has been moribund since October 2020.

The waiver will allow generic manufacturers to override IPRS on medical products, especially vaccines, and make these available sufficiently across geographic locations at a much cheaper cost. This has become an imperative since Big Pharma, in particular Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, has been supplying its costly vaccines to rich nations and leaving the populations of poor countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America majorly unprotected. Experts say the new variants of the SARS-COV-2 virus have emerged on account of this.