House Members, NGOs Ask Biden to Allow TRIPS Waiver at WTO

The House Ways and Means Trade Subcommittee chairman, along with two members of the former NAFTA working group, lent their voices to a letter asking the administration to drop its opposition to a TRIPS waiver at the World Trade Organization. The Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property waiver, requested by India and South Africa, would temporarily end patent protections for new vaccines and diagnostic tests used against COVID-19. Countries are already allowed to do compulsory licenses in the case of emergencies, but only after negotiations on compensating the company for the right to manufacture the drug failed.

AstraZeneca has agreed to technology transfer so that companies in Argentina, Brazil, China and India can make its vaccine, but advocates say the TRIPS waiver would also help countries make diagnostic tests and drugs used to treat COVID-19, where those drugs are currently protected by patents.

Chairman Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., said that he and Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., who also publicized the letter during a Global Trade Watch press conference Feb. 26, worked together to strip extended IP protections for biologic drugs in the new NAFTA. He called that “tackling some of the unnecessary protections for the pharmaceutical industry -- and this is the logical next step.”

Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., a long-time critic of U.S. trade policies, said during the press conference: “The U.S. must reverse its provision at the WTO. We need to support the waiver from India and South Africa in order to be able to help our allies toward ending this pandemic. Why would we want to be standing in the way of assisting and saving people’s lives?

“We need to be a leader in this fight. We shouldn’t come kicking and screaming to a solution.”

The U.S. is not the only party questioning the need for the TRIPS waiver. The European Union, Canada, Australia, Japan and United Kingdom are all in opposition.

Global Trade Watch Director Lori Wallach said that insiders in Geneva are telling her “there is enormous pressure on the European Union” both from civil society and from other countries “to change its position. A lot of the handful of countries that are blocking it are hiding behind the U.S.”

Yuanqiong Hu, a senior legal and policy advisor at Doctors Without Borders, is in Geneva now, and she joined the online press conference to point out that the longer the novel coronavirus rages uncontrolled in countries like South Africa, the more likely variants are to develop that make reaching herd immunity through vaccination more difficult. She said the charity’s doctors in South Africa still can’t get vaccinated. “It will be transformative if [the] U.S. changes position, definitely,” she said. She noted that more than 100 members of the European Parliament have asked the EU to change its position, and that if the U.S. changed its position, it could influence other countries to do so, too. “The momentum, pressure and demand are building up,” she said.

The press conference was tied to a General Council meeting next week at the WTO. The General Council could set the tone, advocates said, for more urgency in drafting a text of a waiver. Requests for comment from the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative and the White House were not responded to by press time.