U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) and three of his colleagues said Congress needs more information to understand the full impact of the intellectual property (IP) provisions included in a draft agreement proposed by the World Health Organization (WHO) on pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response.
“We commend the initiative to improve the global response to the next pandemic, but waiving a broad scope of IP rights is the wrong way to accomplish that goal,” the lawmakers wrote in a Feb. 21 letter sent to U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan.
As such, they urged Sullivan to seek significantly more public feedback through hearings and studies to inform U.S. input on the proposed global accord currently being negotiated by the members of WHO, which in October 2023 released a new draft of the agreement.
Following release of the draft, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in December 2023 issued a request for public input (RFI) on it.
Sen. Tillis and his colleagues, who include U.S. Sen. Christopher Coons (D-DE), agreed that it is critical to prepare for the next pandemic and, in doing so, to think about how to promote better global access to vaccines and medical treatments, according to their letter.
“We are concerned, however, that the proposed agreement threatens these laudable goals by undermining IP laws based on a faulty premise that IP rights impeded the global response to the COVID-19 crisis,” they wrote. “The facts tell a different story.”
For instance, they cited a recent U.S. International Trade Commission report investigating the supply and demand of COVID-19 diagnostics and therapeutics that found many factors other than IP were responsible for barriers to treatment access, including distribution challenges, delays in regulatory approval, weak healthcare infrastructure, and insufficient health education.
Sen. Tillis and his colleagues also pointed out that robust IP protection is at the core of successful pandemic preparedness, and that strong IP rights encourage innovation by incentivizing investment in research and development and support many industries across various technologies that routinely develop new life-enhancing products.
“Contrary to what the draft WHO pandemic agreement text seems to presume, the IP system worked exactly as intended during the COVID-19 pandemic: It incentivized astounding innovations that led U.S. companies and manufacturers to develop and distribute the first vaccines in record time,” wrote the senators.
The draft agreement under consideration, they continued, contains many provisions that “would undercut — if not destroy — the very aspects of our innovation ecosystem that just recently produced such positive results.”
For instance, the proposal would require that companies receiving public funding would have to essentially give away their IP if they developed a successful treatment, whether through compulsory licensing, non-exclusive licensing, or by foregoing royalties, according to the letter.
“We urge you to seek significantly more public feedback than the recent HHS RFI, through hearings and studies, to inform U.S. input on the WHO pandemic agreement,” they wrote.