SouthViews No. 200, 16 June 2020
Making Covid-19 Medical Products Affordable: Voluntary Patent Pool and TRIPS Flexibilities
By Sudip Chaudhuri
The proposal of Costa Rica to create a voluntary pool mechanism for medical products and technologies for COVID-19 has evoked huge interest and optimism. The World Health Organization (WHO) and Costa Rica have followed it up through a Solidarity Call emphasizing the need for voluntary licensing on non-exclusive basis to the Medicines Patent Pool (MPP). The success of a voluntary pool critically depends on the willingness of the patentees to join the pool. In a public health crisis, boundaries of public policy must not be determined by the patentees. MPP will work much better if the patentees are compelled or induced to join the pool. International cooperation is important in this regard. Highlighting the virtues of voluntary measures and promoting MPP without adequate emphasis on the use of compulsory licensing and other TRIPS flexibilities, actually weakens the MPP. In the light of the experience of MPP, the basic objective of this paper is to analyze to what extent voluntary pool mechanisms can be relied upon to make COVID-19 medical products affordable and accessible. It is important to appreciate the achievements of MPP. But the constraints under which it operates, and its limitations must also be kept in mind.
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Making Covid-19 Medical Products Affordable: Voluntary Patent Pool and TRIPS Flexibilities
This article was tagged: Access to Medicines, Affordable Medicines, Antiretroviral Drugs (ARVs), Civil Society (CSOs), Compulsory Licenses, Coronavirus, Costa Rica, COVID-19, Doha Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health, Flexibilities, Generic Medicines, Health, Hepatitis C, HIV/AIDS, Innovation, Intellectual Property, International Cooperation, Medicines Patent Pool (MPP), Multinational Corporations (MNCs), Pandemic, Patent, Patent Pool, Pharmaceuticals, Public Health, Research and Development (R&D), Solidarity for Call to Action, TRIPS, Tuberculosis (TB), Unitaid, United Nations Secretary General (UNSG), United States (US), Vaccines, Voluntary License, WHO, World Health Assembly (WHA), World Health Organization (WHO)
