From the article:
In October South Africa and India therefore proposed to suspend trips rules relating to copyright, industrial designs, patents and trade secrets, until most of the world’s population is immune. James Love of Knowledge Ecology International, a think-tank, says the waiver could help overcome the often intense pressure from rich-country governments on poorer ones not to use flexibilities written into the rules. Patent holders, of course, claim such waivers hurt their incentive to invest. (Whereas under a compulsory licence buyers would have to pay some royalty, under the proposed waiver they would not.)
The truth is that the waiver itself might not do much to expand vaccine production. Without companies facilitating the transfer of technology it would have “roughly zero net effect”, says Rachel Silverman of the Centre for Global Development, another think-tank. And today’s supply constraints reflect manufacturing bottlenecks rather than patent protection. As for other products, Bryan Mercurio of the Chinese University of Hong Kong says that if governments have not issued compulsory licences, often the problem is not with the existing trade rules but with their own domestic lawmaking.
