This Policy Brief discusses issues concerning trade, intellectual property, and technology transfer that are most relevant for consideration at the 13th World Trade Organization (WTO) Ministerial Conference (MC13) in February 2024 and inclusion in its outcomes.
The following recommendations are proposed:
The working group negotiating amendments to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) International Health Regulations (WGIHR) has extended its seventh meeting, which was supposed to end last Friday, to include a special session on equity.
The resumed WGIHR 7 will be held within the first two weeks of March, finally acceding to member state’s requests – including from the Africa Group and the large alliance of countries known as the Equity Group – to give adequate attention to equity.
Unequal access to vaccines and other medical products during the COVID-19 pandemic was one of the triggers for the reform of the IHR, which are the rules setting out countries’ roles and responsibilities, and those of the WHO, during public health emergencies of international concern.
The resumed meeting will pay special attention to a new Article 13A, which addresses the availability and affordability of health products, technologies and know-how, according to a year-old summary of the IHR negotiation text, which is the most recent public version of the negotiating text.
“Seek, and ye shall find” - I am not sure this sermon holds true in global health negotiations.
During this week’s discussions on amending the International Health Regulations, developing countries tried relentlessly to keep the equity agenda on the table of the working group. They may have succeeded for now.
The second part of this sermon: “knock, and it shall be opened unto you: For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened…” (As an agnostic, I am skeptical about this.)
We will be tracking the end-game of these negotiations, to keep our readers up to speed.
IHR revisions are likely to be staid and narrow, developed countries do not have a lot of appetite for what they argue as expanding the scope of these rules.
Also, it is striking how crucial a role interpretation plays in reading “old texts”!
The United States and Paraguay, on behalf of the Cairns Group of farm- exporting countries, seemingly clashed with the European Union, Switzerland, and Japan on 6 February over negotiating the mandate on domestic support and market access in agriculture, which is expected to be agreed upon, barring opposition, at the World Trade Organization’s 13th ministerial conference (MC13) beginning in Abu Dhabi in three weeks’ time, said people familiar with the discussions.
Evergreening patents on medical products – extending the lifespan of patents that are about to expire – is an “abuse of the intellectual property system”, an HIV activist told the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Fair Pricing Forum on Thursday.
Meanwhile, an industry representative laid out her company’s value-based, country-specific approach to improving access to medicines, providing an example of how it had improved access to cancer medicine in Nigeria.
Ukraine-based Sergiy Kondratyuk, who works for the International Treatment Preparedness Coalition, said that evergreening is pervasive and a barrier to lower medicine prices.
“In Thailand, about 70-80% of drug patents are evergreened … and approximately 45% were evergreened Ukraine,” said Kondratyuk.
The 4th WHO Fair Pricing Forum took place from 6 – 8 February 2024. Ellen ‘t Hoen spoke at the opening plenary. Below are her speaker notes.
I started working on medicines pricing in the late nineties, with Médecins sans Frontières. At the time, medicines to treat HIV/AIDS had begun to turn the deadly disease into a chronic one. But only for people living with HIV in the North; elsewhere in the world, people with HIV died.
Antiretroviral medicines needed to treat the disease had a price tag of 10,000 to 15,000 USD per person per year and were out of reach of most people. But their actual cost of production was modest: once generic manufacturers brought ARVs to the market in the early 2000s, prices fell more than 90%.
The following elements made this happen:
The chair of the Doha fisheries subsidies negotiations on 5 February acknowledged that despite “constructive engagement” during the last several days, “some significant divergences in positions and overall approach still remain” on various issues concerning subsidies contributing to overcapacity and overfishing (OCOF) ahead of the World Trade Organization’s 13th ministerial conference (MC13) beginning in Abu Dhabi on 26 February.
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As previously reported in the SUNS, many developing countries seem to be sharply concerned over how the large subsidizers contributing to OCOF are going to be allowed to continue with their subsidies under seemingly weak two-stage sustainability criteria, as well as the alleged failure to include the issue of distant-water fishing in the list of prohibited subsidies.
The Bureau of the Working Group on the Amendment of International Health Regulations (WGIHR) rejected the WHO Secretariat’s proposal to delete equity-related amendment proposals (Article 13 A, Article 44 A and Annex 10).
The WGIHR Bureau did not circulate the Secretariat’s proposals as the Bureau’s text.
Three concepts – The Right to Healthcare, Universal Health Coverage (UHC) and Primary Health Care (PHC) – are all globally accepted as essential principles in the construction of health systems. It is important, however, to delineate how these concepts relate to each other and the variance with which the terms themselves are defined as well as the relationship among and between them as they come to be established in different strands of health policy discourse. This is important because the three terms are often either taken up as independent strategies (with various pathways) or placed in subordinate, linear, conflicting or contradictory relationships rather than first understanding each one clearly and then building up a relational perspective.
With only 10 official negotiating days left, the Working Group on Amendments to the International Health Regulations (WGIHR) is under pressure to reach agreement on changes to the rules that govern global health emergencies.
The seventh WGIHR meeting which began on Monday officially kicked off the 2024 pandemic ‘season’ negotiations at the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva.
It’s a short, intense season though, with the grand finale for both the IHR amendments and the pandemic accord set for the May World Health Assembly.
As Eswatini pointed out, the WGIHR only has 10 official negotiating days left until May, and by Friday, this time will be halved.
Addressing the equity-related gaps in health emergencies should be prioritised, stressed Eswatini, speaking for the 47 African member states and Egypt (part of WHO’s Eastern Mediterranean region).
