University Students Call on the Irish Government to Support the TRIPS Waiver to Provide Equal Access to COVID-19 Vaccines and Treatments.

Students from

• The Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI),
• Trinity College Dublin (TCD),
• University College Dublin (UCD), and
• The National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG)

are calling on the Irish Government to support the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Waiver to enable equality of access to COVID-19 vaccines and treatments, for all countries.

 

The current situation:

As of December 2021, more than 8 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines had been administered worldwide. However, 74% of all vaccine doses went to high- and upper-middle-income countries, while less than 1% went to low-income countries. While more than 90% of eligible people in Ireland had been fully vaccinated by December 2021, vaccination rates in some low-income countries were as low as 7%.

A map showing global vaccination rates can be found at this link.

 

How the TRIPS Waiver aims to address this:

The introduction of a TRIPS Waiver aims to temporarily waive patents and other intellectual property (IP) on urgently needed COVID-19 vaccines, treatments, tests, and other health tools. With regards to vaccines, experts have identified more than 100 manufacturers across Asia, Africa, and Latin America that possess the technical requirements and quality standards to manufacture mRNA vaccines. However, they are currently not allowed to do so, despite the fact that low- and middle-income countries are still unable to access the resources they need in order to help bring an end to this pandemic. We therefore call on the Irish Government to support this TRIPS Waiver, alongside over 100 other nations, to remove legal barriers and allow production to be scaled up by multiple manufacturers for critical COVID-19 vaccines and treatments.

The next meeting of the TRIPS Council has been scheduled for 9-10th March 2022, and therefore this issue needs urgent attention.

 

Who supports the TRIPS Waiver?

More than 100 nations and numerous organisations currently support the TRIPS Waiver. These include:

 

• The World Health Organisation
• Médecins Sans Frontières - Doctors Without Borders
• Oxfam Ireland
• The President of Ireland
• Seanad Éireann
• Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO)
• The Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI)
• University of Limerick School of Medicine
• Women in Global Health Ireland
• The President of South Africa
• The United States of America
• More than 100 academic experts in intellectual property (IP) in an open letter in 2021 (link)
• More than 100 leaders in the Irish scientific and medical community in a joint initiative by Peoples Vaccine Alliance Ireland, the Doctors for Vaccine Equity, the Irish Global Health Network, Oxfam Ireland, and Amnesty International Ireland (link)

 

 

References and Resources:

For anyone interested in learning more about this matter, the links to two excellent discussions on the current issues of COVID-19  vaccine inequity and the TRIPS Waiver are:

1) Recording of the Discussion on “Real Solutions for Vaccine Equity” from the Irish Global Health Network in Nov 2021. https://globalhealth.ie/dve-event/

2) Recoding of a “Discussion on the Proposed TRIPS Waiver for IP Rights Associated with COVID Vaccines and Treatments”. 

This discussion presents some of the current arguments for and against the TRIPS Waiver and includes a briefing from Antony Taubman, Director of Intellectual Property Division of the World Trade Organization, on what the TRIPS agreement is and what would happen if an agreement was reached to initiate the TRIPS Waiver. https://youtu.be/OhjUnFptfjE

 

All of the information presented here can be found in the following locations:

3) Link to the article from MSF that accompanies the map of countries supporting and opposing the TRIPS Waiver. https://www.msf.org/countries-obstructing-covid-19-patent-waiver-must-allow-negotiations

4) Technical Brief from MSF highlighting vaccine supply inequity and project identifying 100 manufacturing sites with the technical requirements and quality standards to manufacture mRNA vaccines, Nov 2021. https://msfaccess.org/pharmaceutical-firms-across-asia-africa-and-latin-america-potential-manufacture-mrna-vaccines

5) Vaccination statistics in Ireland: https://www.hpsc.ie/a-z/respiratory/coronavirus/novelcoronavirus/vaccination/covid-19vaccinationuptakereports/

6) Vaccination statistics in low-income countries: https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations (accessed in December 2021)