COVID vaccine weekly: support builds for patent waiver as shortages threaten to bite

The US has this week backed a proposal to allow countries to manufacture COVID-19 vaccine doses without needing the agreement of the vaccines’ rights holders. This would be enabled by temporarily waiving intellectual property (IP) protection on all COVID-19 medical products. Removing such protections, the waiver’s proponents argue, will increase the amount of vaccine doses produced globally.

This is the theory. But in practice, waiving IP is unlikely to be a short-term solution to increasing vaccine manufacture, argues…

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