By Rossella De Falco
Strong, well-coordinated and resilient public health care services play a vital role in preventing and responding to public health crises. Under international human rights law, States have a positive, primary obligation to ensure that such health care services are of the highest possible quality and accessible to everyone, everywhere, and without discrimination.
By Calvin Wai-Loon Ho
With the mainstreaming of digital technology across many spheres of social life, infodemic management must be an integral part of public health emergency prevention, preparedness, response, and recovery.
While the Principles and Guidelines on Human Rights and Public Health Emergencies (the Principles) do not make explicit reference to infodemics, the application of digital technologies in response to a public health emergency is a clear concern. This article provides further elaboration and critique of the Principles and their treatment of this emergent phenomenon.
By Kayum Ahmed, Julia Bleckner, and Kyle Knight
In mid-May, the World Health Organization officially declared the “emergency” phase of the COVID-19 pandemic over. However, the deep wounds of the pandemic remain, compelling those concerned about this pandemic and future health emergencies to account for catastrophic failures by those in power. These reflections suggest that the public health crisis could have been addressed differently, both reducing COVID-19’s unprecedented magnitude of illness and death, and preserving human dignity.
The COVID-19 pandemic isn’t over, and the end of this pandemic’s emergency phase certainly doesn’t mean we accept the widely abysmal response as the model for the world’s reaction to the next one. Public health emergencies aren’t entirely preventable. We live in a complex world where health is increasingly affected by a changing climate, extraordinary levels of pollution, and inadequate preventive and responsive health services. Emergencies will happen. But when they do, responses that uphold human rights need to be the norm.
By Roojin Habibi, Timothy Fish Hodgson, and Alicia Ely Yamin
Today, as the world transitions from living in the grips of a novel coronavirus to living with an entrenched, widespread infectious disease known as COVID-19, global appreciation for the human rights implications of public health crises are once again rapidly fading from view.
Against the backdrop of this burgeoning collective amnesia, a project to articulate the human rights norms relevant to public health emergencies led to the development of the 2023 Principles and Guidelines on Human Rights and Public Health Emergencies (the Principles).
This symposium gathers reflections from leading scholars, activists, jurists, and others from around the world with respect to the recently issued Principles.
By Ana Santos Rutschman
What can the New York City Marathon experience teach those reflecting on ways to increase equity in the transnational allocation of scarce vaccine doses?
Quite a lot, it turns out. I explore this analogy in a recently published article in the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics (JLME), Increasing Equity in the Transnational Allocation of Vaccines Against Emerging Pathogens: A Multi-Modal Approach.
By Aparajita Lath
Amid ongoing patent disputes over the mRNA platform, a significant scientific question remains unanswered: whether mRNA itself even is patent-eligible.
By Aparajita Lath
Two articles published last month in the BMJ analyze the public investment and financing of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, highlighting the extensive government funding that has supported the development of mRNA technology from 1985 to 2022.
However, rewards from these government investments are going back into the hands of pharma corporations and shareholders, with little thought given to public needs.
Together, these articles underscore the injustice of the present moment and emphasize the need to reform intellectual property protections for government-funded inventions of public health significance.
By Matthew Chun
With its leadership in drug development, biotechnology, and computing technologies, the United States touts itself as being “the most innovative economy in the world.”
But when did the U.S. rise to its position as a global leader in these areas? Which regions of the country have led the charge? And what is the next frontier of American innovation?
To begin exploring these questions, I analyzed 45 years of publicly available patent data to map the growth of U.S. innovation in the life sciences and computing fields from 1976-2021. I also mapped the recent growth of patented “hybrid” inventions, which are closing the gap between these historically disparate fields. In particular, the hybrid inventions explored in this project represent interdisciplinary advances in areas including bioinformatics, cheminformatics, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing.
By Sarah Gabriele
Two pharmaceutical giants of the pandemic, Moderna and BioNTech, are taking steps for increasing the manufacturing capacity for the COVID-19 vaccine in Africa. Last March, Moderna announced its plan to set up a manufacturing facility in Kenya to produce messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines, including COVID-19 shots. Similarly, in 2021, BioNTech started planning its own manufacturing plant in Africa, which will be composed of modular shipping containers.
Measures to address global vaccine inequity could not come sooner. As of December 15, 2022, only 34% of the population in Africa has received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, with Moderna and BioNTech having provided fewer doses compared to Oxford-AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson. After failing to successfully deliver vaccines equitably during the first two years of the pandemic, Moderna and BioNTech appear now to be taking steps to shoulder greater responsibility for vaccine equity.
However, if companies are ethically required to address the availability of vaccines, these well-intended efforts might still fail to fulfill their moral obligations. Indeed, while the construction of these new sites might sound like great news for fostering the delivery of vaccines in low- and middle-income countries, we should be aware that these manufacturing sites, as well as the existence of manufacturing capacity, might not be enough to achieve desired outcomes.
By Aparajita Lath
Last month, the patent battle between COVID-19 mRNA vaccine manufacturers continued with BioNTech/Pfizer filing a strong defense and counter-claim to Moderna’s allegations of patent infringement.
In their initial August 2022 complaint, Moderna alleged that three of its mRNA patents were infringed by Pfizer/BioNTech. Interestingly, as of January 12, 2023, Moderna has listed 10 patents covering Spikevax (its mRNA vaccine) on its website. Since biotechnology inventions can be covered by several patents, each of which may not be easy to identify through public searches, the decision to publish a consolidated list of patents is a move in the right direction. However, the list is an evolving one, and, as it happens, one of three patents at issue, i.e., patent no. 10,933,127 (‘127) has not been listed.
The following article explains the key patents at stake in the intellectual property dispute.