The World Health Organization held a meeting in search of a method of treatment against corona virus, for companies and laboratories to proceed without getting stuck on intellectual property rights. In this meeting, a patent pool was voluntarily created as a result of researches on this virus, information discovered about the virus, products such as vaccines.
Treatment methods research on COVID-19 has been confusing since the very beginning. When a treatment is found, it is uncertain whether it will be available to the whole world. In addition, patent applications belonging to Wuhan Institute caused many controversy. You can find detailed news about these topics in the “Information Center” section of our website. The World Health Organization and the heads of countries are generally concerned about whether this treatment will reach the poor population if there is a possible treatment. When it comes to human health, it is quite normal for the authorities to have such a rush.
After that, Costa Rican government officials took action two weeks ago to establish a voluntary mechanism under the auspices of the World Health Organization. The purpose of this mechanism is to make a non-profit organization between governments, universities and industries.
World Health Organization Director, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said on Monday; “I support this offer and work with Costa Rica to complete the details.” He said.
Last week, drug producers have been called to make it accessible to people in poor countries. Pharmaceutical manufacturers were requested to include patents for the treatment of diseases such as HIV, tuberculosis and hepatitis C in the pool.
Considering the costs of treatments and drugs, as well as the costs of their patent rights, it is very difficult for poor countries to access treatment. For this reason, we will see how useful this move of the Costa Rica and the World Health Organization is for the poor people.
In addition, we know that it will take months for these treatments to be available to the public due to legal processes, even if treatment is available. We mentioned in our previous articles about this period. There is some good news about this. First of all, in the past weeks, Canadian MPs have adopted a new bill to speed up the licensing process. Apart from this, Germany has expanded its right to suspend patent rights. Lawmakers in Chile and Ecuador called on their governments to discover their licenses.