Global Health Jurisprudence: COVID-19 Pandemic and Pharmaceutical Patents

Abstract

The onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic has claimed millions of lives across the globe, and since its emergence, it has brought to the fore the urgency of addressing public health issues from a global perspective. Notwithstanding the calls for collective action and ambitious global initiatives launched under the aegis of the World Health Organization (WHO), the search for effective new drugs and vaccines and their equitable and affordable access remain captive to the contentious issue of balancing the commercial (intellectual property) rights of the medicine manufacturers and the basic right to health of the vast majority of humankind. There has been a divide among the governments of the developed and developing countries as they jockey to seek trade concessions and intellectual property (IP) waivers in multilateral Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) forums to ensure affordable treatment for their population. Neither the multilateral trade talks nor the parallel global initiatives, especially the ambitious COVID-19 Technology Access Pool (C-TAP) project, has made the promised progress, thus showing that the ground reality is a far cry from the appealing ideas of global solidarity. The pandemic continues to take its toll; calls for a global response to global challenges are getting louder and shriller by the day. The present study attempts to trace the history of collective action in the realm of public health from the social and commercial perspectives. It is to seek a globalized approach to global health issues within the framework of distributive justice. It is observed that the present global framework found a sound economic sense with little scope for global health jurisprudence.