Question to the Department for International Development:

To ask the Secretary of State for International Development, if the Government will support the ACT Accelerator and its grantees to work with the World Health Organisation’s Covid-19 Technology Access Pool.

The UK has welcomed the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator since its launch on 24 April 2020. We look forward to further engagement with this collaborative initiative and continue to support the work done under the ACT Accelerator to develop new vaccines, treatments and tests, and to accelerate global access?to these essential health technologies for?everyone. The UK has also long supported affordable and equitable access to essential medicines through our funding. We have committed over £313 million of UK aid to the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), the?COVID-19?Therapeutics Accelerator and the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND), supporting equitable access to COVID-19 medical technologies.

We are seeking additional detail from the World Health Organisation on how the COVID-19 Technology Access Pool (C-TAP) will fit into the wider global governance for development of COVID-19 medical technologies (including the ACT-Accelerator). The UK supports the work of the Medicines Patent Pool as an existing mechanism to facilitate pooling and IP sharing. We remain committed to collaborating with public and private partners on additional arrangements to support equitable and affordable access, including options for non-exclusive voluntary licensing. We believe that a voluntary approach to intellectual property has advantages over mandatory approaches, and creates a sounder basis for long-lasting, beneficial relationships, and incentives to create new much-needed innovations.