‘More than 100 countries have upped the stakes for text-based negotiations on the TRIPS waiver proposal that seeks to temporarily suspend certain provisions of the WTO’s TRIPS Agreement in combating the COVID-19 pandemic, amidst attempts by Big Pharma to kill the waiver proposal, said people familiar with the development.
‘Ahead of the WTO’s TRIPS Council meeting on 10 March, the representatives of Big Pharma wrote to President Joseph Biden that the “US government has stood alongside other governments, including the European Union, United Kingdom, Japan, Canada, Switzerland, Brazil, and Norway to oppose this waiver.”
“We urge your administration to maintain this longstanding support for innovation and American jobs by continuing to oppose the TRIPS waiver,” said the CEOs of Pfizer, AstraZeneca, PhRMA (Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America), Eli Lilly, Bristol Myers Squibb, Gilead Sciences, Merck, Sanofi, Takeda Pharmaceuticals, Novartis, Abbvie, Bayer AG, Amgen Inc, and Biogen among others.
‘The CEOs of these companies, who constitute the powerful Big Pharma, decried the waiver proposal, saying that “in requesting the waiver, India and South Africa argued without evidence that the intellectual property is hindering the global response to the pandemic and that the waiver would help scale up research, development, manufacturing and supply of needed products.”
Read here (Third World Network, Mar 12, 2021)
