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Biden Reverses on Vaccine Patent Restrictions in Move that Could Help India with Covid Pandemic
Biden follows through on campaign commitment: “This is the only humane thing in the world to do”
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Dipayan Bose/NurPhoto/AP
In a dramatic, and likely life-saving, reversal, the Biden administration has announced that it favors breaking patent protections on Covid-19 vaccines to speed their deployment in combating the global pandemic.
The announcement came from the office of the United States Trade Representative, Katherine Tai who vowed to make the case for waiving the intellectual property rights before of the World Trade Organization. “This is a global health crisis, and the extraordinary circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic call for extraordinary measures,” Tai wrote. While emphasizing that the Biden administration “believes strongly in intellectual property protections” as a general principle, it now backs waiving vaccine IP “in service of ending this pandemic.” Tai vowed the administration would “work with the private sector and all possible partners – to expand vaccine manufacturing and distribution,” while also working to improve the supply of “raw materials needed to produce those vaccines.”