Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, what assessment he has made of whether the TRIPS waiver proposal at the WTO that would suspend global patent rules during the covid-19 pandemic will enable the scale-up of manufacturing required to make enough doses to vaccinate the world.

The UK does not consider waiving intellectual property (IP) rights to be an appropriate action to boost the manufacturing of safe, effective, and quality vaccines. The existing intellectual property framework has mobilised research and development to deliver a host of new medicines and technologies to detect, treat, and defend against COVID-19. We have not yet seen evidence of how such a waiver of IP rights would improve the current situation. The UK continues to engage in constructive and evidence-based discussions at the TRIPS Council on the waiver proposal, and to address the multiple factors outside of IP on which access to medicines depends.

The UK is among the biggest global donors on COVID-19, and committed to supporting rapid, equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines. We have pledged over £1 billion of UK aid to counter the health, humanitarian, and economic risks. To support global vaccine access, we have funded a range of international organisations with the expertise to deliver an 'end to end' approach from research, development, and clinical trials, through to supporting manufacturing scale-up and delivery.