Compulsory Licensing: A Remedy for COVID Vaccines?

  • Ayushi Srivastava
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  • Ayushi Srivastava

    Student at The ICFAI University, Dehradun, India

  • Sanchita Jain

    Student at The ICFAI University, Dehradun, India

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Abstract

Since the recent World Health Assembly didn't declare future Covid-19 vaccines a world' public good', they're confirmed as private (intellectual) property and can be subject to patent rights protection as a pharmaceutical product. In expectation of the wants of their most at-risk populations, governments of developing countries are obliged to prepare to issue compulsory licenses of any effective COVID-19 treatments. Compulsory licensing, a provision within the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of intellectual property rights ("TRIPS Agreement"), enables governments to provide their citizens with generic versions of patented treatments either through domestic production or foreign imports. The compulsory licensing of trade secrets present some unique obstacles, and consideration is given to some practical solutions that might balance the interests of technology owners and the public interest in increased access to vaccines. These covid vaccines are new, and their internal capabilities and efficacy ensure the potential futility of compulsory licensing. This paper studies the compulsory licensing and with respect to the covid drugs and vaccines, the Doha Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and the Public Health. The paper further discusses the situation of providing compulsory licensing to covid vaccines in India and how much of a viable alternative can compulsory licensing, in this case, can be?

Type

Research Paper

Information

International Journal of Law Management and Humanities, Volume 5, Issue 1, Page 737 - 744

DOI: https://doij.org/10.10000/IJLMH.112543

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This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution -NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits remixing, adapting, and building upon the work for non-commercial use, provided the original work is properly cited.

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