Professor Aisling McMahon has published an article entitled “Intellectual Property Rights and Global Access to Health Technologies During Pandemics: Reflecting on Vaccine Nationalism, COVID-19 & the WHO Pandemic Agreement Negotiations — The Need for Collective Action and Institutional Change” in the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics. The Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics is a journal of the American Society of Law, Medicines and Ethics (ASLME). This is a leading international peer reviewed journal publishing research at the intersection of law, health policy, ethics, and medicine.
This article is published as part of a special issue of the JLME edited by Dr Mina Hosseini (UCD) and Prof Imelda Maher (UCD), arising from a symposium on ‘Public Health, Markets and the Law’ which took place in September 2023 in UCD as part of Dr Hosseini’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie funded COMPHACRISIS project.
In this article, Prof McMahon focuses on how intellectual property rights (IPRs), including patents, were used over vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic and the role of IPRs in contributing and enabling vaccine nationalism where States often prioritised national interests, and competed for access to COVID-19 vaccines during the pandemic. The article considers how this in turn led to a significant inequity between high income countries and low- and middle-income countries around access to COVID-19 vaccines with implications for global public health in tackling the pandemic. In this article, she argues that key aspects of the current legal and institutional system related to global health align towards delivering individualistic state/regional/rightsholders priorities in the use of IPRs over pandemic health technologies. Reflecting on the recent World Health Organization Pandemic Agreement, the article argues that nationalism is also evident in the negotiating of this text and in some of provisions in the final text related to IPRs and technology transfer for future pandemics. Nonetheless, the adopted WHO Pandemic Agreement leaves considerable discretion to states around IPRs, and much will depend on how it is implemented in practice in future.
Thus, for effective future pandemic preparedness around how IPRs are used over health technologies, this article argues that a bottom-up institutional change is needed within the health innovation context — one which offers nuanced strategies to balance the potential incentivization role of IPRs with the implications that certain uses of IPRs can have on access to downstream health technologies.
This article is published open access and available to read here .
This article was developed by Professor McMahon as part of the European Research Council funded PatentsInHumans project which she leads as Principal Investigator. The PatentsInHumans project examines the bioethical issues posed by patents and how such rights are used over technologies related to the human body. You can find out more about the project at the project website: www.patentsinhumans.eu