Trade Therapy: Deepening Cooperation to Strengthen Pandemic Defenses
Figure 2.11 NRA decisions on WHO-EUL COVID-19 vaccines, December 2020 to February 2022 120 100 80 60 40 20
1 Ju n21 Ju l-2 1 A ug -2 1 Se p21 O ct -2 1 N ov -2 1 D ec -2 1 Ja n22 Fe b22
ay -2
M
21
1
pr -
-2 ar
M
A
1
1
b2 Fe
Ja
D
ec
-2
0
0 n2
Number of NRA decisions
88
EUA
Full approval
Rejected
Source: Author’s calculations, based on Airfinity 2022, https://science.airfinity.com/covid-19-vaccines. Note: This figure includes decisions on only those COVID-19 vaccines that have received an Emergency Use Listing of the World Health Organization (WHO-EUL). EUA = emergency use authorization; NRA = national regulatory authority.
regulated (such as community face masks) or to enable domestic production that was initiated to avoid disruptions in supply. The majority (66 percent) of the COVID-19–related TBT notifications covered medical goods such as PPE, medicines, other medical devices and equipment (such as ventilators), and medical supplies (such as nasal swabs). Many NRAs activated emergency use authorizations (EUAs) to fast-track vaccine approval.35 Emergency authorization is temporary and is used to meet urgent health needs. A significant number of EUAs were granted to COVID-19 vaccines by national authorities in the first half of 2021 (figure 2.11). Some NRAs used expedited procedures to grant an EUA by relying on the work and data of other regulators and the Emergency Use Listing of the WHO (WHO-EUL). This was especially useful for NRAs in LMICs. For example, the Ghana Food and Drugs Authority approved some vaccines using its own EUA guidelines while it approved others relying on stringent regulatory authorities and the WHO-EUL (WTO 2021). NRAs have granted full approval to just six COVID-19 vaccines.
IPR policies during the pandemic The COVID-19 experience suggests that biomedical innovation can be rapid even when patent protection is less dominant as an incentive (see, for example, Sampat and Shadlen 2021). Other factors—such as the support of research efforts by public entities and private sector actors with nonmonetary motivations and direct R&D subsidies— may have played more important roles. That said, the record time in which COVID-19 health technologies have been developed has also been attributed to R&D preceding the COVID-19 pandemic and the patenting of technologies building on earlier activities (WIPO 2022). This calls for a more subtle empirical analysis of the role of IPR as an incentive for R&D during pandemics (see also Conti 2022).
