Negotiations for a possible suspension of patents for anticovid treatments and tests that are held within the framework of the World Trade Organization (WTO) must be abandoned, defended this Wednesday the director general of the main global federation in the sector, Thomas Cueni .
In statements during a press conference organized by the Association of Accredited Correspondents before the UN in Geneva (ACANU), Cueni, director of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations (IFPMA), assured that this suspension “could compromise the quality of our work”.
“The debate should be closed at a time when there is unprecedented collaboration between innovative companies and those that make generics.”, assured Cueni, who added that jeopardizing the current progress of this cooperation “it’s stupid”.
“The generic manufacturers themselves have recognized that they could not have worked without the support of innovation firms”, while the latter “stress that they would not have taken certain risks in the investigation if they had not had the necessary protection“, argument.
Cueni stated that at a time when the pandemic is receding and is becoming an endemic disease in many countries, with which we will have to live like the flu, “we must make sure that what worked well is not lose in future pandemics”, especially “trust in science”.
“Private innovation should not be compromised”, declared the head of IFPMA, who nevertheless acknowledged that during the pandemic there were negative cases of “vaccine nationalism” for example, “caused not a single dose to leave the United States until September 2021″.
The negotiations in the WTO want to extend the suspension of patents to vaccines that was already agreed in June of last year to anti-covid treatments and tests, to which the pharmaceutical companies also expressed their initial opposition.
In December, the WTO decided to extend the negotiations to at least the first months of this year, although the debate is far from over due to the opposition that remains between producing countries (especially developed economies) and developing nations.
In the historic June agreement, it was decided that the suspension of patents for vaccines would last for five years, something that took more than a year and a half to agree on, due to the disagreements that existed mainly between those same blocks.
Source: EFE
Source: Gestion
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