COVID Vaccine Patents

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:12 pm on 14 December 2021.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 2:12, 14 December 2021

Well, Llywydd, I'm not aware of any such actions by the UK Government, and I will be very surprised indeed if they were prepared to take any, because they continue to block proposals for waiving intellectual property rights at the World Trade Organization. I know that Jenny Rathbone will be very well aware that it's a year—more than a year now—since South Africa and India proposed a temporary waiver for intellectual property rights on COVID-19 vaccines and took that proposition to the World Trade Organization. In May of this year, the United States declared themselves in favour of such a waiver, and well over 100 countries have now put their weight behind that. A relatively small number of countries around the world continues to block those discussions, and the UK Government is one of them. The WTO last met at the end of October, and I'm afraid that the reports were that negotiations on a waiver are deadlocked and direction-less because of that handful of countries. That is why I have written to the Prime Minister urging him to remove the United Kingdom from that position; that we should support the position put forward by South Africa and India, but by the United States as well, because that would unlock the position where we wouldn't be reliant upon the goodwill of individual pharmaceutical companies, but there would be a concerted across-the-globe position where intellectual property rights would not be a barrier to getting the rest of the world vaccinated. I'm reminded of what the former Prime Minister Gordon Brown said only a few days ago: that the well-resourced west is playing Russian roulette with COVID-19, and that while we don't make the effort we need to make to make sure that everybody is vaccinated, somewhere in the world, a variant is brewing that may be one that completely escapes vaccine protection, that will be more serious than the versions we currently are dealing with. It's in everybody's interest, exactly in the way that Jenny Rathbone said, to make sure that the whole of the world's population has the protection of vaccination, and a temporary waiver on intellectual property rights would be one important step in helping to secure that outcome.