Day June 10, 2022

Revisiting Canada’s Access to Medicines Regime in Response to COVID-19: A Review of the Legislation and its Underlying Objectives

[Muhammad Zaheer Abbas] Abstract: The current COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the significance of the export-oriented compulsory licensing mechanism for countries lacking domestic manufacturing capacity. Article 31bis, the first amendment to the World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement), is aimed at giving effect to the WTO General Council Decision 2003, which waived the domestic market requirement of compulsory licensing. In 2005, Canada became the first country to amend its patent laws to provide for Canada’s Access to Medicines Regime (CAMR) as enabling legislation to implement the WTO General Council Decision 2003. Canada clearly described its regime as a humanitarian initiative aimed at helping developing countries that lack sufficient drug and/or vaccine manufacturing capacity of their own and rely upon imports to address their public health problems. The legislation was compromised, however, by the conflicting desire to protect the corporate interests of patent-holding corporations.

Time to Walk Away from the WTO Proposed Text

[Brook Baker] Twenty months ago, India and South Africa proposed a comprehensive but temporary waiver of enforcement of WTO intellectual property monopolies on COVID-19 vaccines, medicines, diagnostics, and other medical supplies that would have triggered a faster, more affordable, and more equitable COVID response. Rather than respond with alacrity and solidarity, the rich countries of the world, acting on behalf of Big Pharma, united with delay, distortion, and disinformation. The result is an illusory, do-nothing text, cobbled together by the WTO Secretariat, that the U.S., European Commission, Germany, Switzerland, and the U.K. are trying to cram down the neck of developing countries already choking on a steady diet of broken promises and immeasurable death, suffering, and economic disruption.