Title: 'The Proposed Pandemic Treaty and the Relative Importance of Intellectual Property'
Speaker: Dr Ellen 't Hoen, Medicines Law and Policy
Biography
Ellen ‘t Hoen (1960) is the director of Medicines Law & Policy, a group of legal and policy experts offering advice to international organizations and governments. From 1999 until 2009 she was the director of policy for Médecins sans Frontières. In 2009 she joined UNITAID in Geneva to set up the Medicines Patent Pool (MPP). She was the MPP’s first executive director until 2012. She has published widely and is the author of several books. In 2017 she received the Prix Prescrire for her book “Private Patents and Public Health: Changing intellectual property rules for public health.” In 2005, 2006, 2010, 2011 and in 2020 she was listed as one of the 50 most influential people in intellectual property by the journal Managing Intellectual Property. In 2020, she was appointed Officer of the Order of Oranje-Nassau, a royal award given in recognition of her work on access to medicines. She has a master’s degree in law from the University of Amsterdam and a PhD from the University of Groningen where she remains a Global Health Law Fellow at the law faculty.
Abstract
The Covid-19 pandemic has laid bare the lack of regulation for the sharing of intellectual property (IP) and technology needed for an effective and equitable response to the crisis. While the world of science contributed transparently to the knowledge needed to produce Covid-19 vaccines within an unprecedented short time frame, there was no mechanism in place to ensure that the resulting manufacturing technologies would be globally accessible. Instead, it is private pharmaceutical companies that are now the holders of the intellectual property and regulatory dossiers needed to bring the products to market. The Covid-19 pandemic demonstrates that it is difficult to regulate the open sharing of IP/know-how and technology while a global health emergency is unfolding. It would therefore be desirable to have a global legal framework in place that provides for the sharing of manufacturing know-how and that is triggered by the occurrence of a pandemic. The Pandemic Treaty scheduled for discussion at the World Health Assembly in the fall of 2021 is an opportunity to develop such a framework. The discussions should focus on ensuring that the IP and knowledge needed to develop and produce essential pandemic health technologies become global public goods as well as the predictable and sufficient financing for the development of such public goods.
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