US supports extension for Covid-19 IP waiver decision – Endpoints News

Af­ter much de­bate, the US gov­ern­ment is now call­ing for a dead­line ex­ten­sion to dis­cuss a con­tro­ver­sial po­ten­tial IP waiv­er for Covid-19 di­ag­nos­tics and ther­a­peu­tics.

Over the last five months, the Of­fice of the Unit­ed States Trade Rep­re­sen­ta­tive said it has con­sult­ed with mem­bers of Con­gress, pub­lic health ad­vo­cates, or­ga­nized la­bor groups, aca­d­e­mics, think tanks, com­pa­nies and trade as­so­ci­a­tions on the WTO’s re­cent TRIPS agree­ment, which es­tab­lished a 5-year waiv­er of cer­tain patent re­quire­ments on Covid-19 vac­cines.

Their con­clu­sion? That stake­hold­ers need more time and more in­for­ma­tion to de­cide whether the par­tial waiv­er of in­tel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty rights should ex­tend to di­ag­nos­tics and ther­a­peu­tics. It will al­so ask the Unit­ed States In­ter­na­tion­al Trade Com­mis­sion to launch an in­ves­ti­ga­tion in­to Covid-19 di­ag­nos­tics and ther­a­peu­tics, sup­ply and de­mand, price points, test­ing and treat­ing, and pro­duc­tion and ac­cess.

“Re­al ques­tions re­main on a range of is­sues, and the ad­di­tion­al time, cou­pled with in­for­ma­tion from the USITC, will help the world make a more in­formed de­ci­sion on whether ex­tend­ing the Min­is­te­r­i­al De­ci­sion to COVID-19 ther­a­peu­tics and di­ag­nos­tics would re­sult in in­creased ac­cess to those prod­ucts,” US­TR am­bas­sador Kather­ine Tai said in the state­ment.

The TRIPS agree­ment was reached on June 17 af­ter nu­mer­ous de­lays. While pro­po­nents have ar­gued that IP waivers would in­crease ac­cess to vac­cines and ther­a­peu­tics in low- and mid­dle-in­come coun­tries, in­dus­try crit­ics be­lieve a waiv­er would jeop­ar­dize com­pe­ti­tion.

PhRMA, an ad­vo­ca­cy and lob­by­ing group in the bio­phar­ma space, sup­port­ed the an­nounce­ment by the US on Tues­day.

“In­dus­try has suc­cess­ful­ly com­bat­ed COVID-19 with enough vac­cines and treat­ments to meet glob­al de­mand,” a PhRMA spokesper­son said in a state­ment. “We have urged the U.S. gov­ern­ment and oth­er pol­i­cy­mak­ers to fo­cus on the re­al bar­ri­ers to glob­al med­i­cine ac­cess, in­clud­ing the last-mile lo­gis­tics, weak health care in­fra­struc­ture and reg­u­la­to­ry and trade bar­ri­ers that we’ve seen dur­ing the pan­dem­ic.”