On May 5, President Joe Biden announced that the United States would support an international bid to waive intellectual property rights to vaccines for the duration of the coronavirus pandemic, thereby ostensibly allowing other countries to ramp up production even of the sophisticated technology behind the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines against COVID-19. Many in the global health community and developing world welcomed the decision as a victory for greater equity in vaccine distribution, in which middle- and low-income countries are lagging far behind wealthy ones.
