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At a meeting of the Council for Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) on 13 February, WTO members adopted two reports that the Council Chair, Ambassador Pimchanok Pitfield of Thailand, had developed to complete work in Geneva as much as possible before ministers gather in Abu Dhabi on 26-29 February for the 13th WTO Ministerial Conference

The reports address two issues the Council has been discussing since the 12th Ministerial Conference (MC12) in June 2022: whether to extend the Ministerial Decision on the TRIPS Agreement (WT/L/1141) to COVID-19 therapeutics and diagnostics, and the Council's current and future work under paragraphs 23-24 of the Ministerial Declaration on the WTO Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic and Preparedness for Future Pandemics (WT/L/1142).(MC13).

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.

This Policy Brief discusses issues concerning trade, intellectual property, and technology transfer that are most relevant for consideration at the 13^th World Trade Organization (WTO) Ministerial Conference (MC13) in February 2024 and inclusion in its outcomes.

The following recommendations are proposed:

Text has been proposed by the Bureau of the Working Group on Amendments to the International Health Regulations 2005 (WGIHR) that seeks to make WHO prequalified vaccines as a compulsory requirement for the issuance of vaccine or prophylaxis certificates, raising concerns of vaccine supply concentration.

This took place at the recent 7^th meeting of the WGIHR held from 5 to 9 February 2024.

Vaccine certificates are used as evidence of vaccination to facilitate international travel. Article 36 of the IHR states that travellers in possession of a vaccine certificate should not be denied entry unless the competent authority has verifiable indications and/or evidence that the vaccination or other prophylaxis was not effective.

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.

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:

“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 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 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 13^th 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.