The European Commission says Covid-19 vaccines should be global public goods, but do their...
The European Commission has entered into advance purchase agreements (APAs) for Covid-19 vaccines with six pharmaceutical companies and is concluding negotiations with two companies....
How the ‘Oxford’ Covid-19 vaccine became the ‘AstraZeneca’ Covid-19 vaccine
The ‘Oxford / AstraZeneca’ vaccine is one of the world’s leading hopes in the race to end the Covid-19 pandemic. Its history is not...
Brazil’s Federal Court Reviews Medicines Mailbox Patents
This week the media reported that the Brazilian federal court removed the patent protection for eculizumab, sold under the brand name Soliris by Alexion...
WTO Covid-19 TRIPS Decision: Some observations
This morning, 17 June at 5 AM the 12th World Trade Organization (WTO) Ministerial Conference (MC12) approved a package of decisions and declarations. The...
EU Review of Pharmaceutical Incentives: Recommendations for Change
In 2016, the European Council decided it was time for a review of the incentives that the EU provides to companies that develop new...
The European Parliament has now explicitly acknowledged the know-how problem too: time to include...
This technical briefing note is also available as a PDF here.
We have been calling attention to the problem of sharing know-how necessary for the...
Lessons for a pandemic preparedness treaty from previous successes and failures with treaty-based technology...
This post can also be downloaded as a PDF here.
1. Introduction
Scaling-up production of new vaccines to provide many billions of doses on a time-scale...
Sharing know-how/trade secrets during a pandemic: We must be planning for it now
Medicines Law & Policy has recently proposed a provision for inclusion in the draft WHO pandemic instrument currently being discussed in Geneva (here and...
CJEU Ruling on Truvada recalls ‘evergreening’ goes against public health interests
On 25th July 2018, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) rendered its preliminary ruling on the interpretation of Article 3(a) of Regulation...
Ensuring that intellectual property rights aren’t a barrier to scaling-up: the remarkable example of...
This week various international bodies are tackling different challenges in meeting the urgent problem of scaling-up manufacture of and access to vaccines for Covid-19....