[Muhammad Zaheer Abbas] The COVID-19 pandemic has raised serious concerns about affordable and equitable access to the needed health technologies. The patent-based pricing model of health technologies further exacerbates these concerns. This paper critically evaluates Article 73(b) of the World Trade Organization Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (WTO TRIPS Agreement) to answer the key question: whether this safeguard provision can be invoked by WTO Member States in response to COVID-19 in order to improve access to critically needed health technologies. This is an important question because access to health technologies is a matter of life and death in a pandemic situation.