There is now broad and growing support for the Trips waiver – among doctors, Nobel laureates, senators and a large majority of the US public. “The extraordinary circumstances of the Covid-19 pandemic call for extraordinary measures,” said US trade representative Katherine Tai, committing to “text-based negotiations at the World Trade Organization”. And the Covid-19 pandemic is certainly not the end of this crisis: from Sars and Ebola to mutant strains of Covid-19, epidemiologists warn that we have entered a new age of pandemics. Yet an overwhelming majority of US voters support a more radical transformation of the pharmaceutical patent system. But US voters – whose tax dollars funded the medical breakthrough behind Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine, just as UK voters funded AstraZeneca’s – are calling BS.

Source: The Guardian May 07, 2021 10:07 UTC