As major pharmaceutical companies worldwide scrambled to develop new vaccines to battle COVID-19, the wealthiest countries have likewise scrambled to secure early access to those vaccines. The result has been a wildly unequal distribution in which some countries will complete vaccinations by mid-2021 and others will still be waiting well into 2023. Although there is a myriad of reasons for this inequality, some scholars have identified strict protection of intellectual property as one part of the problem. In particular, many are concerned that a failure to share knowledge surrounding developing and manufacturing the vaccines has resulted in fewer suppliers and, ultimately, global shortages.

In general, the rules governing intellectual property (IP) aim to balance the encouragement of innovation with the needs and rights of those consuming it. However, this balance has become particularly contentious, when wealthier countries prioritize incentives for knowledge creation in a way that decreases access to necessary medicines, or in this case, vaccines. During 2020 and early 2021, the urgency of finding the right balance of IP protection and access to innovative products and ideas reached its zenith. The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed how the current trade and investment regime can present a major roadblock to access to almost every product and service needed to address this public health crisis.

Many have written about the urgency of making available, through facilitating and liberalizing global trade, the tests, masks, ventilators, medicines and vaccines that are necessary for all countries combating the pandemic. Others have pointed out that we need to temporarily remove or fundamentally change patent protection for certain medicines so that more companies—both innovators and generic manufacturers—can be testing the impacts of potential anti-viral medicines and vaccines. This chapter demonstrates that international cooperation to meet global challenges involves ample policy flexibility in IP, delinking nontrade areas from trade enforcement measures, and, especially, focusing on building long-term capacity building in countries in need of development.

Liberalizing Trade for Public Health

Trade in personal protective equipment, medical devices and treatments and vaccines has been in the spotlight since March 2020 when the United States and Europe began to take real notice of COVID-19.