The Biden Administration will support waiving intellectual property protections for COVID-19 vaccines, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai said Wednesday, a move advocates say would be a major step forward toward global vaccine equity.
“This is a global health crisis, and the extraordinary circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic call for extraordinary measures” Tai said in a statement. “The Administration believes strongly in intellectual property protections, but in service of ending this pandemic, supports the waiver of those protections for COVID-19 vaccines.”
Tai went on to say that the U.S. will actively participate in negotiations with the World Trade Organization (WTO) to make sure this happens.
The move fulfills a campaign promise made by President Joe Biden to activist Ady Barkan, who asked the then-Democratic candidate if he would commit to sharing COVID-19 vaccine technology with other countries.
“Absolutely, positively,” Biden told Barkan in July 2020. “This is the only humane thing in the world to do.”
“The Administration’s aim is to get as many safe and effective vaccines to as many people as fast as possible,” Tai added in her statement. “As our vaccine supply for the American people is secured, the Administration will continue to ramp up its efforts … to expand vaccine manufacturing and distribution.”
WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala appealed to member countries earlier Wednesday to quickly present and negotiate over a text that could temporarily ease trade rules that protect COVID-19 vaccine technology, creating the ability to ramp up access to life-saving doses at a time of urgent need.
“What was striking about today was this very strong declaration by all members on this shared objective — which is ramping up production and distribution of these vaccines and therapeutics and diagnostics in the developing world, where there is a great inequity in terms of of distribution,” WTO spokesman Keith Rockwell told reporters.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki noted earlier Wednesday that Biden had expressed support for similar waiver ideas during his campaign, but as president is running “a process ... that includes all stakeholders in the administration.”
“We take intellectual property incredibly seriously, and we also, though, are in the midst of a historic global pandemic, which requires a range of creative solutions,” she said. “We’re looking at it through that prism.”
The argument, part of a long-running debate about intellectual property protections, centers on lifting patents, copyrights, and protections for industrial design and confidential information to help expand the production and deployment of vaccines during supply shortages. The aim is to suspend the rules for several years, just long enough to beat down the pandemic.
The issue has become more pressing with a surge in cases in India, the world’s second-most populous country and a key producer of vaccines — including one for COVID-19 that relies on technology from Oxford University and British-Swedish pharmaceutical maker AstraZeneca.
Proponents, including WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, note that such waivers are part of the WTO toolbox and insist there’s no better time to use them than during the once-in-a-century pandemic that has taken 3.2 million lives, infected more than 437 million people and devastated economies.
More than 100 countries have come out in support of the proposal, and a group of 110 members of Congress — all fellow Democrats of Biden — sent him a letter last month that called on him to support the waiver.
Opponents say a waiver would be no panacea. They insist that production of coronavirus vaccines is complex and simply can’t be ramped up by easing intellectual property, and say lifting protections could hurt future innovation.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.