Daily Times

The Red Cross on Tuesday stressed the need for “extraordinary steps” to increase access to Covid-19 vaccines around the world, including speeding up negotiations towards patent waivers.

The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement called for states and pharmaceutical companies to move much faster towards evening out glaring inequities in access to the jabs around the world. Among other things, countries should accelerate thorny negotiations at the World Trade Organization (WTO) towards removing intellectual property protections for the Covid vaccines, and other barriers blocking a rapid scale-up of production of the jabs around the world, it said. “In the middle of the worst pandemic in 100 years, the intellectual property waiver for Covid-19 vaccines is a necessary political commitment to address inequities in access at the scale and speed we need,” Francesco Rocca, president of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), said in a statement.

“Millions of lives depend on it and on the equally important transfer of technology and knowledge to increase manufacturing capacity worldwide,” he added. The WTO has since October faced calls led by India and South Africa for the temporary removal of intellectual property protections on Covid-19 vaccines, in what proponents say will boost production in developing countries and address the dramatic inequity in access. But that notion has long met with fierce opposition from pharmaceutical giants and their host countries, which insisted patents were not the main roadblocks to scaling up production and warned the move could hamper innovation.