TY - JOUR T1 - Overriding drug and medical technology patents for pandemic recovery: a legitimate move for high-income countries, too JF - BMJ Global Health JO - BMJ Global Health DO - 10.1136/bmjgh-2021-005518 VL - 6 IS - 4 SP - e005518 AU - Katrina Perehudoff AU - Ellen 't Hoen AU - Pascale Boulet Y1 - 2021/04/01 UR - http://gh.bmj.com/content/6/4/e005518.abstract N2 - Summary boxCompulsory licenses are legal tools to override patent-protection on medicines and medical technologies. Compulsory licenses can help scale up the production and lower prices of patent-protected medicines while still accounting for the patent holder’s interests.Compulsory licensing is making a comeback in high-income countries as a negotiation strategy and a legal tool to remedy high prices and/or supply shortages of medicines and medical technologies.High-income countries that face potential legal hurdles (in world trade law and/or in the regulation of test data and market exclusivity) to effectively use compulsory licensing in the COVID-19 pandemic should consider taking measures now.Scaling up access to new COVID-19 vaccines and therapies (‘medicines’) and medical technologies is essential to move from pandemic response to recovery. One of the key conditions for governments to produce and/or procure a sufficient supply of COVID-19 medicines is access to their intellectual property (IP). Although the research and development (R&D) of many vaccine and therapeutic candidates has been partially or entirely publicly funded, the resulting products will be owned by the companies that bring them to market. Therefore, intellectual property rights will be a significant determinant of global access to COVID-19 medicines.Intellectual property rules aim to compensate inventors for their investments in R&D, while also making innovations available for use by the public. The underlying premises of this system have been called into question for, among other reasons, the disconnect between growing public-funding for drug R&D resulting in privately-owned medicines. In 1995, a set of global trade rules in the World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement on the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS Agreement) established the minimum standards for protecting intellectual property worldwide (see box 1). These trade rules drastically impacted human health: introduced near to the 2000s HIV/AIDS global epidemic, owners of patents and other forms of … ER -