On 15th December 2021, the Irish Seanad passed a motion proposed by Senator Alice Mary Higgins in favour of the government supporting the TRIPS waiver proposal. The TRIPS waiver proposal was originally put forward in October 2020 by India and South Africa and is a proposal to temporarily suspend intellectual property rights over COVID-19 vaccines, medicines and diagnostics as a key step to enable increased global production of such health technologies. Whilst over two thirds of people in high income countries have access to COVID-19 vaccines, just over 11% of people in low-income countries have such access – this inequity is a moral catastrophe. It is also self-defeating as without global access to vaccines, there are risks of greater spread of the disease in regions with limited vaccination, and risks of new variants emerging which may be resistant to existing vaccines. Despite this, the EU and UK continue to oppose the TRIPS waiver proposal.
The Seanad motion which passed unanimously calls on the Irish Government to support the TRIPS waiver. It also urges the Irish government to call on the European Commission to end its blockage of the TRIPS waiver proposal and to support a TRIPS waiver.
Dr Aisling McMahon’s work was cited during the Seanad debate in speeches by Senator Alice Mary Higgins and Senator Róisín Garvey. During the debate, Senator Higgins remarked:
“I want to address the countermotion because it does not stand up. I thank Dr. Aisling McMahon of Maynooth University, Dr. Luke McDonagh of the London School of Economics and many experts who have rebutted it. Let us be clear: there has been stalling and there have been disingenuous arguments, none of which stands up. The idea that there is insufficient manufacturing capacity was disproved last spring. It was disproved again this week when 100 specific factories were identified that could be producing within three months. The idea that incentives and innovation would be killed does not stand up”.
Whilst Senator Róisín Garvey arguing in favour of the motion stated:
“Nearly two years after the pandemic commenced, flexibilities within the TRIPS Agreement, including compulsory licensing, have not been used by any country to increase production of vaccines despite many experienced manufacturers around the world being ready and willing to make hundreds of millions of doses... leading academic experts in intellectual property law, such as Dr. Aisling McMahon of Maynooth University with whom I had a meeting last week, and Dr. Luke McDonagh of the London School of Economics, have outlined why this approach is not suitable. It involves a cumbersome, inefficient, time-consuming and complicated legal process involving hundreds of patents and must be repeated using a country-by-country, patent-by-patent approach…”
The full Seanád debate can be watched on the 15/12/21 Seanad debates (from 07:42:58) available here .Whilst a written transcript of the debate is available here.
Dr McMahon (Associate Professor, Maynooth University) has written extensively on the role of intellectual property rights in the context of access to COVID-19 vaccines, medicines and diagnostics. This work includes a co-authored LSE Law Working Paper on the TRIPS waiver proposal written together with Dr Siva Thambisetty, Dr Hyo Yoon Kang, Dr Luke McDonagh and Professor Graham Dutfield published in May 2021, which is available here. Dr McMahon and Dr McDonagh also recently published a short opinion piece in the Journal.ie on the TRIPS waiver.