“The story of the rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines is a true scientific miracle, but also presents a major public policy conundrum that reveals the crucial connections between innovation, technology, national and international policies, and public welfare.”
CIGI President Rohinton P. Medhora’s op-ed on vaccine nationalism in The Globe and Mail
Vaccine Nationalism Exposes Trade, IP Rights Problems
Rohinton P. Medhora’s work with the Commission on Global Economic Transformation on the pandemic and resulting economic crisis revealed deficiencies in global trade and IP rights governance. In a brief to the Canadian Parliament’s Standing Committee on International Trade, he said that COVID-19 vaccines presented a major public policy conundrum that led to “a series of cascading inequities.” While support for the COVAX distribution system and a temporary Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) waiver have somewhat mitigated this, “nationalism is neither a winning health proposition nor a winning economic one.”
CIGI Senior Fellow James Bacchus wrote that the pandemic — and questions over the extent to which the TRIPS Agreement protects the exclusivity of IP rights in COVID-19 vaccines — has given the WTO an opportunity to modernize trade-related rules on IP rights.