WCL Hosts Program Public Session on COVID-19, Vaccines, and Trade
July 7, 2021
On July 1, American University's Summer Program on the WTO & U.S. Trade Law and Policy hosted a public session on COVID-19, Vaccines and Trade.
The panel featured Sean Flynn, Director of PIJIP; Padideh Ala’i, professor of law at WCL; Renata Amaral, adjunct professor at WCL; Simon Evenett, professor at the university of St. Gallen; Henning Grosse Ruse-Khan, the co-director of CIPIL at Kings College; and Antony Taubman, the Director of IP Division at the World Trade Organization.
Renata Amaral moderated, asking the panel to discuss supply chain issues, what to expect with the different variants of the current strain, and how the proposed TRIPS waiver currently under debate at the World Trade Organization could help countries obtain vaccines.
“The COVID pandemic represents an unprecedented disruption to the global economy and world trade as production and consumption are scaled back across the globe. Maybe the current challenge affords us an excellent opportunity to demonstrate the central role of trade and international corporation in addressing the world’s most pressing problems,” said Amaral.
PIJIP Director Sean Flynn discussed some of the work PIJIP's project on the Right to Research has done to ensure that the proposed TRIPS waiver covers a broad range of intellectual property rights.
“Over 250 organizations and prominent researchers and experts involved in our project on the Right to Research in International Copyright have called for the reduction of copyright barriers to COVID-19 prevention, containment and treatment. The TRIPS waiver may address one part of the problem – prohibiting WTO challenges to efforts of governments to share access to copyrighted algorithms and software needed for vaccines and treatments. But other action will be needed to address other urgent problems, such as the fact that over three quarters of the world’s copyright laws prohibit online uses of educational and research materials,” said Flynn in a statement.