Compulsory licensing and access to future Covid-19 vaccines

Compulsory licensing and access to future Covid-19 vaccines: This paper examines compulsory licensing and Paragraph 6 of the Doha Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health as policy alternatives to voluntary licensing for access to affordable future Covid-19 vaccines. With regard to manufacturing capacity, the EU and its member states may not be eligible to import since they opted out of the Paragraph 6 system outright (although they may still export under the same system). Fortunately, this does not appear to be a major problem since statistics show that most EU27 imports of all pharmaceuticals are from Europe itself, with China a distant second supplier.