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Intellectual Property: Protection and Enforcement

    • Meeting in digital format
    • 22 March 2021

          At just over a year from the outbreak of the pandemic, the attention being given to the delays and difficulties of the vaccine campaign is overshadowing a fundamental fact: it took less than 12 months for scientists to produce a successful anti-covid vaccine. This is an astonishing result, and is thanks to public/private collaboration. That atmosphere of cooperation must not be allowed to fail now as efforts are made to manage its production and distribution.

          National and European authorities certainly have the right to consider all the options on the table in order to speed up the immunization process. Nevertheless, one element must be kept in mind: patents have been a facilitating factor in developing the vaccine, not an obstacle. Research is an onerous process in terms of time and financial and professional resources, and this is even truer for the pharmaceutical industry due to the risks associated with the lower odds of success in the early stages of clinical studies.

          The European Commission recognizes the pharmaceutical industry as a priority sector for investments in research and development at a continental level due to its significant impact on the availability of innovative treatments.  Having accelerated the reaction to the pandemic, intellectual property is the driving force behind such successes and will continue to play that role as scientists tackle variants of the virus. Its protection is vital.

          Given this scenario, industry and governments need to understand what tools they can use to confront what is currently one of the vaccine campaign’s key problems: the availability of vials. Industries are collaborating even with their competitors to identify new production sites; from this standpoint, the idea of compulsory licensing not only ignores the efforts the sector is making but also underestimates the timeframes necessary for production. The fact that it takes qualified technologies and personnel up to eight months of preparation to go into production makes the license obligation a barrier to confronting the immediate need for doses.

          The European Union continues to be a key actor in this and other challenges posed by the pandemic. Initially, by lending considerable support to research and industry (even when results were not clear), they made it possible to accelerate the development of vaccines. Secondly, the EU has worked and continues to work toward ensuring access to vials across the continent in a difficult and highly fragmented market hamstrung by a web of national regulatory barriers.

          Moreover, Europe continues to defend a model based on the complementarity of “the right to health” and of the protection of intellectual property. Europe is defending this model in international forums even in the face of pressure from countries making every attempt to conceal major industrial interests. Such a global approach is fundamental, since the present stage is delicate, and not only due to the difficulties inherent to eradicating covid: the governance and collaboration models that emerge from this are going to be essential to handling future health threats. Thus, defending the possibility of maintaining shared consideration of health and intellectual property means not only protecting the competitiveness of European research and industry, but also continuing to support scientific progress and better health conditions around the world.

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