Steve Bates Chair of ICBA said “The leaked QUAD proposal of a waiver on intellectual property rights for COVID vaccines would, if agreed, have a chilling impact on investment into the small companies that have been at the heart of the solutions to COVID-19. It would do nothing to solve the challenges we face in 2022 and make it far harder for small companies pioneering in this space in future”
“Small biotechs throughout ICBA member countries, including, for example, companies such as Canada-based Acuitas Therapeutics, BioNtech from Germany and the UK’s Vaccitech, all depend on their intellectual property to deliver key innovations that underpin the current generation of COVID -19 vaccines. Alongside these successes are many, many companies in our community that invested heavily and failed to make breakthroughs. This proposal directly threatens this innovative ecosystem’s ability to attract the capital needed to develop next generation of vaccines whilst doing nothing to solve the access challenges we have in 2022.”
“The reported proposal misguidedly casts IP as a barrier to COVID-19 vaccine access and distribution despite there being abundant supply of COVID-19 vaccines given the collective manufacturing globally of over 11 billion doses in 2021. Weakening IP rights does nothing to facilitate the distribution of these manufactured vaccines to people around the world who most need them – rather prioritizing addressing healthcare infrastructure and vaccine hesitancy in the developing world would lead to more shots in arms.”
