Dr Luke McDonagh recently spoke to Nature about the proposal made by India and South Africa in October 2020 to waive IP rules under the WTO TRIPS Agreement to allow more vaccine production in global south countries. The TRIPS waiver proposal has the support of more than 100 countries, including the US and China, but crucially, not the UK and EU, which continue to block the measure at the WTO. The Nature editorial of 7th December 2021 is titled ‘Omicron: the global response is making it worse’. The editorial states:
“IP scholars such as Luke McDonagh at the London School of Economics and Political Science say IP relief for the duration of the pandemic will kick-start vaccine manufacturing around the world. But the EU is resisting, partly because of the strength of opposition from European pharmaceutical companies that fear they will lose their market share if their competitors are allowed to use their designs.”
Click here to read the full article in Nature.
Dr McDonagh, along with LSE colleague Dr Siva Thambisetty and three other academic experts, is a co-author of a LSE Law Working Paper on the TRIPS Waiver proposal published in May 2021, which is available here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3851737