1. Tai supports the waiver for COVID-19 *vaccines*. The waiver proposal is for all products related to the pandemic: medicines, testing kits, PPE, ventilators, etc
2. She anticipates a long negotiation, suggesting the US *might* be seeking constraints or conditions
3. The proposed waiver is not only for patents, which already have flexibilities such as compulsory licensing, but also three other areas, which don't—copyright, industrial designs and trade secrets.
It will be interesting to see if the US accepts waiving all four areas
4. The EU, UK, Switzerland, Japan and some others may now struggle to resist the waiver. We'll see.
5. Waiving an obligation to protect intellectual property in WTO agreements does not require countries to drop protection. It simply allows them to do so legally, if they want to
6. Countries applying the waiver will still have legal work to do domestically. They'll have to change their laws and/or regulations in a way that conforms with whatever the waiver says.
7. Not my field, but I understand copying vaccine production is not simple. Others will know
8. There is already some speculation that is a strategic move by the US govt to put pressure on pharmaceutical companies to share their technology with countries that can make the vaccines. That would be simpler and quicker than going through the legal rigmarole //end
Elaboration on point 7 ⬆️ about the complexity of vaccine production
I'm happy to read about where policies might be going wrong, to discuss whether the characterisation of the ideologies behind trade liberalisation are correct.
But is the WTO is only of that ideology? The leap to "WTO reform" is illogical
1. It's false to assume that "rules-based" (p8) means the same as "liberalisation". You can have "rules-based" trade barriers and indeed the WTO agreements allow for many. Some argue that having predictable rules is more valuable than lowering tariffs that are already low.
2/5
2. Which highlights the fact that WTO agreements—the outcome of negotiations—are a compromise between different interests and different ideologies. The WTO system does not come from just one ideology.
That makes the paper's notion of "WTO reform" quite off target.
3/5
Today's meeting was both a formal Trade Negotiations Committee and informal heads of delegations—unclear how that works since "formal" is on the record with minutes and "informal" is off the record with no minutes.
Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna mRNA vaccinations ongoing. J&J approved, not ordered. Supply picking up. Not yet approved: AstraZeneca, Curevac and Novavax. Switzerland has ordered over 30m doses for 8m people
…One minister insisted the draft mustn’t be released until approved. Next moment, delegates from that country were in the press room giving copies to favoured journalists…
Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna mRNA vaccinations ongoing. J&J approved, not ordered. Supply picking up. Not yet approved: AstraZeneca, Curevac and Novavax. Switzerland has ordered over 30m doses for 8m people