As countries around the globe work to get their citizen vaccinated against COVID-19, a battle over intellectual property rules has emerged at the World Trade Organization. Last year, Canada passed legislation designed to ensure that patents would not pose a barrier to securing supplies of a vaccine or treatment. A year later, developing countries around the world have looked to the WTO to develop similar standards through a waiver process that would speed up access to, and production of, vaccines. Yet the proposal has run into opposition at the WTO, including from Canada.
Thiru Balasubramaniam is the Geneva Representative of Knowledge Ecology International, where he works on IP, health, and trade issues at the WTO, WIPO, and World Health Organization. He joins the Law Bytes podcast to discuss the recent developments at the WTO, the position of developed countries such as Canada, and what this means for global access to critical vaccines.
The podcast can be downloaded here, accessed on YouTube, and is embedded below. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcast, Google Play, Spotify or the RSS feed. Updates on the podcast on Twitter at @Lawbytespod.
Show Notes:
India and South Africa TRIPS Waiver Proposal
Government of Canada TRIPS Council Statement, February 2021
Credits:
Al Jazeera English, Vaccine Patent Waiver Calls: 100 Countries Push for More Equitable Access
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Thank you for telling us about this. Now, during the quarantine period and when the world economy is in one of the worst conditions, I understand that our country is not quite able to help someone else. After all, quarantine and covid hit all countries very hard, as well as ours. In general, it was very interesting to listen to you and the information that you bring up. I really hope that soon this whole story with the covid will simply end and will be part of our story. I hope that soon we will just remember those days and no longer have to impose such strict restrictions.
I was just cleaning up my bookmarks. Michael, yours has to go.
There’s no Sars CoV 2. They have not isolated – proven the existence of – the virus, as Ontario activist Christine Massey and others have shown. Rockefeller health care science says that pathogens and diseases come in pairs. If they can’t show you the pathogen that causes the disease that they say it causes…
Rockefeller (allopathic, for profit) health care science / ideology began as a fraud and it’s less of a fraud now. That’s especially true when it comes to virology, where the definition of ‘isolate’ is exactly the opposite of isolate. Not even the hoaxsters own numbers add up to a pandemic. I can’t believe that you don’t know this. I’m therefore forced to conclude that you, along with most of the planet, have gone over to the dark side.
WHO changed the definition of pandemic in 2009 and recently changed it’s definition of ‘herd immunity’. Can you say “Kaching!” Do you not know how corrupt that Bill Gates-funded entity is? It masquerades as a watchdog but it’s really a marketing and sales agency for big pharma, especially the vaccine makers. And it has its own patents and profits from vaccines.
As for vaccines, the covid 19 injections (or most of them) are not traditional vaccine tech. As David Martin points out, ‘vaccine’ has a specific, legal, technical definition that is not met by the mRNA covid 19 injections. And if you’re relying on pharma-funded tv to inform you, I have an invisible spirit car that I’d like to sell you. If you’re genuinely interested in knowing what these injections (not proven safe and ‘only’ rolled out under emergency use authorization, a fraud in itself) are doing to people, then you could do worse than to visit “Vaccine Impact.”
Shame on you!
I meant to say that Rockefeller health care is ‘not’ less of a fraud now.