On Friday, 8 March 2024, Knowledge Ecology International (KEI) delivered the following intervention at the resumed session of the seventh meeting of the Working Group on Amendments to the International Health Regulations (2005).
8 March 2024
The two negotiations are efforts to formalize a collaboration among governments to deal with pandemics and health emergencies. There are some measures that will be required to be undertaken by all parties, and other measures where a universal mandate will not be possible.
An important challenge is to find ways to share access to the inventions, know-how and other inputs to drugs, vaccines and other countermeasures.
One approach is to create incentives for parties to share some rights acquired from publicly funded R&D or procurements, in a reciprocal manner, with parties that also share. Another approach would be to provide money or other incentives to acquire rights to patented inventions, know-how and other inputs, from private rights holders.
This does conflict in some ways with the notion that the benefits would be universal. It can be implemented so that the collaboration is open to any party.
The reason for sharing rights only among parties that opt-in, is to create an incentive to share, and to address the sharing of the costs as well as the benefits of product development. In such a collaboration, the obligations on parties, involving both terms and conditions in funding and procurement agreements and funding of R&D or product acquisition should scale with incomes and stages of development.
Any reciprocal sharing of rights should be without prejudice to other efforts to obtain more universal sharing of rights.