Ramaphosa welcomes US support for waiver of Covid-19 patent protections

In October last year, South Africa and India proposed a temporary waiver on Covid-19 patents on behalf of emerging economies that face vaccine shortages and production challenges.

The United States government announced its support on Wednesday, saying that the Covid-19 pandemic was a global health crisis which called for extraordinary measures.

It said while it believed strongly in intellectual property protections, it would support the waiver of those protections for Covid-19 vaccines in the hope of ending the pandemic.

Ramaphosa has welcomed the support from President Joe Biden.

“The anticipated temporary waiver provides a global response to Covid-19. The proposal establishes a global solution to enhance manufacturing and boost supply capacity and enables coordination and access to information currently under patent protection.

“For countries that do not currently have manufacturing capacity on certain medical technologies, the waiver could open up more supply options and avoid countries being reliant on only one or two suppliers. Where supply-capacity currently exists, it can be repurposed to Covid-vaccine production and in this way improve the supply available to all nations,” Ramaphosa said in a statement.

Ramaphosa added that the upcoming World Trade Organisation negotiations provide the global community with both an opportunity and the challenge to act in everyone’s best interest.

“This can be achieved by focusing on the moral, legal and economic benefits of providing urgent, affordable and equitable protection to all people around the world in the face of a grave and indiscriminate threat to life and economic sustainability.”

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