Posts Tagged: "vaccine diplomacy"

Former U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Directors Andrei Iancu and David Kappos, and former Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke, today released a White Paper calling the Biden Administration’s decision to support a waiver of intellectual property protections for COVID-19-related technologies under the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) “strategic folly.” The report was produced by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). In the paper, titled “The Shot Heard around the World”, the three officials, two of whom served under the Obama Administration, explained that the United States must indeed ramp up its efforts to improve vaccine diplomacy and to distribute more vaccines globally, but that “[w]aiving IP protections would not lead to the manufacture of a single additional dose of a vaccine.” Instead, they proposed a number of alternative solutions to solve the “real problems.”