The TRIPS Waiver Negotiations at the World Trade Organization

A blow-by-blow account of the highly political and contentious negotiations around the TRIPS Waiver proposal at the World Trade Organization (WTO) between October 2020 and March 2024. For more than three years, developing countries fought against the inequities in the access to medical products, to address the pandemic of COVID-19. As many as 100 countries, led by South Africa and India, sought to challenge existing rules that protect Intellectual Property (IP), in an attempt to boost manufacturing capacities for medical products during COVID-19. This, they did, at the WTO in Geneva, by seeking to temporarily suspend certain provisions of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), legal rules that govern intellectual property matters.
It is a battle these countries lost in June 2022, after first bringing this bold proposal to the WTO in October 2020 that directly sought to challenge the monopolies of big pharmaceutical companies on medical products. Many developed countries are home to the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world.
What was finally agreed upon was a narrow set of clarifications of existing rules applicable to the production of vaccines, in sharp contrast to the paradigmatic shift that the proponents of the Waiver proposal had originally sought. In the end, these rules were not extended to tests and treatments to address COVID-19, as initially envisioned by the demandeurs.
The protracted, but unsuccessful negotiations show how the WTO failed in addressing the challenges of COVID-19 that resulted in more than 15 million associated deaths due to the pandemic. So while the TRIPS Waiver failed to become a trade policy option at the WTO in the context of health emergencies, it undoubtedly reset the debate on the role of IP in global health.
This updated edition is a compilation of nearly 70 stories that chronicle these negotiations between 2020-2024. The reportage was published in Geneva Health Files, an investigative journalistic initiative tracking power and politics in global health.