Tournament: Meadows | Round: 4 | Opponent: Millard North JS | Judge: Vennelakanti, Vis
====There’s a huge and dangerous inequality in vaccination rates.====
Lynch, 21
Lynch, David J. "Poor Countries’ Struggles amid Vaccines Shortfall Threaten Greater Instability, Migration and Disease." Washington Post, The Washington Post, 29 June 2021, www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2021/06/29/global-economy-pandemic/. Accessed 9 July 2021.
Even as millions of Americans enjoy a post-pandemic boom, fresh covid-
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will actually see a political crisis on the back of the economic crisis."
====Factories are ready to make vaccines, but patents won’t allow them to.====
Cheng and Hinnant, 21
Cheng, Maria and Hinnant, Lori. "Countries Urge Drug Companies to Share Vaccine Know-How." AP NEWS, Associated Press, 20 Apr. 2021, apnews.com/article/drug-companies-called-share-vaccine-info-22d92afbc3ea9ed519be007f8887bcf6.
In an industrial neighborhood on the outskirts of Bangladesh’s largest city lies a factory with
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Any company which has experience synthesizing molecules should be able to do it."
Kumar, 21
(Rajeesh, Associate Fellow Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analysis, https://www.idsa.in/issuebrief/wto-trips-waiver-covid-vaccine-rkumar-120721)
In October 2020, India and South Africa had submitted a proposal to the World
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not expedient in a public health crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic.
To end the pandemic, people in LICs need to be vaccinated. If we don’t fix the vaccine inequality, millions more will die.
Clendaniel, 21
Clendaniel, Morgan. "Why Global Herd Immunity Is out of Reach: 99 of People in Poor Countries Are Unvaccinated." Fast Company, Fast Company, 5 July 2021, www.fastcompany.com/90652213/why-global-herd-immunity-is-out-of-reach-99-of-people-in-poor-countries-are-unvaccinated.
Public health experts estimate that approximately 70 of the world’s 7.9 billion
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when countries cooperate, COVID-19 deaths drop by approximately in half.
Meyer, 21
(David, Senior Writer, https://fortune.com/2021/06/18/wto-covid-vaccines-patents-waiver-south-africa-trips/)
The World Trade Organization knows all about crises. Former U.S. President
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all our ambassadors to the table to negotiate a text," she said.
The WTO reduces war through peace dividends, interdependence, and rule of law
Baldwin and Nakotomi, 15
(Richard Baldwin, professor of international economics at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Michitaka, Consulting Fellow at the Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI) and a Special Adviser to the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO). https://cepr.org/sites/default/files/policy'insights/PolicyInsight84.pdf, July)
The WTO, and the GATT before it, has been one the planet’s precious
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only – example of a multilateral and nearuniversal framework of rules and law.
The WTO is crucial to make global trade equitable and reduce poverty
Narlikar, 18
(AMRITA NARLIKAR is President of the GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies and a professor at the University of Hamburg. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2018-03-05/trade-war-poor, 3-5)
Recurrent deadlocks have plagued the Doha negotiations since their launch in 2001, damaging the
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DSM has been the stomping ground of only developed countries and rising powers.
Future Pandemics
The plan creates a new goldilocks patent law that exempts pandemics.
Lindsey, 21
(Brink, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2021/06/03/why-intellectual-property-and-pandemics-dont-mix/, 6-3)
Waiving patent protections is certainly no panacea. What is needed most urgently is a
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employ other, more direct means to incentivize the development of new drugs.
Another pandemic WILL happen.
MacKenzie, 21
Published on September 7, 2021, "Stopping the Next Pandemic: How Covid-19 Can Help Us Save Humanity," by Debora MacKenzie. Debora MacKenzie has been covering emerging diseases for more than 30 years as a science journalist for outlets like New Scientist magazine. She has been reporting on COVID-19 from the start, and she was among the first journalists to suggest that it could become a pandemic. From SARs to rabies and Ebola to AIDs, she's been on the frontline in reporting on how pandemics form, why they spread, and how to stop them throughout her career. In addition to infectious disease, she also specializes in reporting on the science of complexity and social organization. Before becoming a journalist, she worked as a biomedical researcher.
Second, this pandemic won’t be the last one. There are simply too many
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our risk is global; our response and our cooperation must be global.
A temporary TRIPS waiver creates a precedent for early action and for LICs to be able to produce their own medicines—saving lives.
Berger, 21
Berger, Miriam. "Global Vaccine Inequality Runs Deep. Some Countries Say Intellectual Property Rights Are Part of the Problem." Washington Post, The Washington Post, 20 Feb. 2021, www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/02/20/poor-countries-arent-getting-vaccines-waiving-intellectual-property-rights-could-help/.
On the other side are South Africa and India, leading the charge on behalf
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action instead could "allow countries to prepare to produce and share resources."
The aff plan is to implement the patent waiver proposed by India and South Africa.
Communication from India and South Africa to the WTO, 20
(WAIVER FROM CERTAIN PROVISIONS OF THE TRIPS AGREEMENT FOR THE PREVENTION, CONTAINMENT AND TREATMENT OF COVID-19 https://docs.wto.org/dol2fe/Pages/SS/directdoc.aspx?filename=q:/IP/C/W669.pdfandOpen=True, 10-2)
An effective response to COVID-19 pandemic requires rapid access to affordable medical products including diagnostic kits, medical masks, other personal protective equipment and ventilators, as well as vaccines and medicines for the prevention and treatment of patients in dire need. 6. The outbreak has led to a swift increase in global demand with many countries facing acute shortages, constraining the ability to effectively respond to the outbreak. Shortages of these products has put the lives of health and other essential workers at risk and led to many avoidable deaths. It is also threatening to prolong the COVID-19 pandemic. The longer the current global crisis persist, the greater the socio-economic fallout, making it imperative and urgent to collaborate internationally to rapidly contain the outbreak. 7. As new diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines for COVID-19 are developed, there are significant concerns, how these will be made available promptly, in sufficient quantities and at affordable price to meet global demand. Critical shortages in medical products have also put at grave risk patients suffering from other communicable and non-communicable diseases. 8. To meet the growing supply-demand gap, several countries have initiated domestic production of medical products and/or are modifying existing medical products for the treatment of COVID-19 patients. The rapid scaling up of manufacturing globally is an obvious crucial solution to address the timely availability and affordability of medical products to all countries in need. 9. There are several reports about intellectual property rights hindering or potentially hindering timely provisioning of affordable medical products to the patients.3 It is also reported that some WTO Members have carried out urgent legal amendments to their national patent laws to expedite the process of issuing compulsory/government use licenses. 10. Beyond patents, other intellectual property rights may also pose a barrier, with limited options to overcome those barriers. In addition, many countries especially developing countries may face institutional and legal difficulties when using flexibilities available in the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement). A particular concern for countries with insufficient or no manufacturing capacity are the requirements of Article 31bis and consequently the cumbersome and lengthy process for the import and export of pharmaceutical products. 11. Internationally, there is an urgent call for global solidarity, and the unhindered global sharing of technology and know-how in order that rapid responses for the handling of COVID-19 can be put in place on a real time basis. 12. In these exceptional circumstances, we request that the Council for TRIPS recommends, as early as possible, to the General Council a waiver from the implementation, application and enforcement of Sections 1, 4, 5, and 7 of Part II of the TRIPS Agreement in relation to prevention, containment or treatment of COVID-19. 13. The waiver should continue until widespread vaccination is in place globally, and the majority of the world's population has developed immunity hence we propose an initial duration of ~x~ years from the date of the adoption of the waiver. 14. We request that the Council for TRIPS urgently recommends to the General Council adoption of the annexed decision text.
The entire waiver proposal: https://docs.wto.org/dol2fe/Pages/SS/directdoc.aspx?filename=q:/IP/C/W669R1.pdfandOpen=True
The proposal suspends parts of TRIPS and applies to multiple types of IP that have to do with COVID.
Kang et al, 21
Kang, H. Y., Thambiesetty, S., Bosse, J. (2021, May 7). TRIPS waiver: there’s more to the story than vaccine patents. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/trips-waiver-theres-more-to-the-story-than-vaccine-patents-160502 Dr Hyo Yoon Kang's research interests are in intellectual property, knowledge techniques, transmissions and practices, construction of values and valuation practices, novelty and creativity, and hermeneutic/post-hermeneutic approaches to the study of law. She has a cross-disciplinary training and professional background in law, history of sciences, and science and technology studies. Prior to joining Kent Law School, she was an Assistant Professor of Science Studies at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland and a postdoctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin. She earned a PhD in Law at the European University Institute, Florence, with a thesis which explored the implications of human gene patenting on the legal concept of human personhood. She read Government and Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science and also graduated there with a Distinction from the Masters of Laws (LLM) programme.
The US has announced its limited support for the "Trips waiver", a proposal to suspend intellectual property protections for products and technologies needed for the fight against COVID-19, including vaccines, for the duration of the pandemic. This would involve a temporary suspension of certain rules set out in the Trips agreement, the intellectual property treaty of the World Trade Organization (WTO). The waiver was first proposed by India and South Africa – two countries with robust generic pharmaceutical manufacturing capacity – in October 2020 as one important tool to address availability of COVID-19 vaccines, diagnostic tools and therapeutic treatments. For seven months, the proposal has made little progress due to opposition from the US, the EU, Switzerland, the UK, Japan and others. The surprise announcement garnered a positive response in many quarters, and was soon echoed worldwide, with the EU, New Zealand and France expressing more willingness to negotiate. Yet the US is the centre of attention because its statement is such a big departure from its previous antagonism towards other countries’ public health measures that affect intellectual property rights. For example in 1996, it threatened to impose sanctions on Brazil for reforming patent laws to improve access to AIDS medication. Given this history, and intense lobbying from the pharmaceutical sector, the US support for the Trips waiver was for many a welcome surprise. Support for the waiver, and the latest US Trade Representative report indicating that the US will respect the right to grant compulsory licenses consistent with the the Trips agreement, may give all trading partners, not just developing countries, the confidence to boldly use those powers to improve the supply of COVID-19 vaccines without fear of trade retaliation. But aspects of the US announcement are more narrow in scope than the original proposal. The initial proposal would cover all technologies for the detection, prevention, treatment and response to COVID-19, while the US statement limits its support for waiving intellectual property rights in vaccines only. While vaccines are the centre of attention right now, the broader proposal would address the limited supply of therapeutics, like Baricitinib or Redemsivir, or diagnostics, like reagents for COVID test kits. Nevertheless, the US support could help bring the Trips waiver to the next stage of "text-based negotiations". There is now hope that formal negotiations can start addressing outstanding issues, such as how long the waiver would last, and whether anything more than vaccines may be covered. As the Trips waiver gained public attention, many have referred to the measure as a "patent waiver". This has obscured other intellectual property rights which are included in the original proposed Trips waiver: copyright, trade secrets, and designs – not just patents. Patents certainly deserve a lot of attention: the manufacturing and supply of one product, especially complex biologics like COVID-19 vaccines, is often governed by multiple patents, which may be owned by different entities. But trade secrets, which protect different kinds of exclusive information, including data gathered during the regulatory approval process, and tacit know-how are also essential for manufacturing and producing vaccines. Providing incentives to share or reveal trade secrets, information covered by non-disclosure agreements, as well as regulatory submissions, such as clinical trial data, would not only spur competition. It would also provide the basis for further innovation. This was seen in the case of Shantha Biotechnic’s development of a hepatitis B vaccine for Indian domestic supply, which used yeast instead of the traditional bacterial system, allowing production of a low-cost Indian vaccine which went on to become the mainstay of a global vaccination drive led by Unicef. Some of the COVID-19 vaccines on offer – those developed by BioNTech and Moderna – use mRNA, a relatively novel technology that has only recently been produced in large numbers. Many countries may not yet have the means or know-how to produce them domestically. The WHO has set up a mRNA technology transfer hub to provide a mechanism to share the technology globally, but none of the current vaccine manufacturers have yet offered their help or expertise to this initiative.
The standard is maximizing expected well-being.
My Value for the debate is utilitarianism. Util is a moral system where the rightness or wrongness of an action is judged by the outcome it produces. This is the best system for debating government actions for 3 reasons:
- State actor—states are not moral individuals so they can’t have Kantian intent.
2. Topic specific- debates about the WTO and patents inevitably regress to consequences—the patents are moral or immoral because of their ability to help or hurt the world.
3. Relational wording- Member nations in the resolution is plural, this implies we are debating about how the international community should be shaped and not what an individual’s moral obligations may be.
Goodin, 95
Robert, 1995, Philosopher of Political Theory, Public Policy, and Applied Ethics. Utilitarianism as a Public Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, pg. 26-27
The great advantage of utilitarianism as a guide to public conduct is that it avoids gratuitous sacrifices, it ensures as best we are able to ensure in the uncertain world of public policy-making that policies are sensitive to people’s interests or desires or preferences. The great failing of more deontological theories, applied to those realms, is that they fixate upon duties done for the sake of duty rather than for the sake of any good that is done by doing one’s duty. Perhaps it is permissible (perhaps it is even proper) for private individuals in the course of their personal affairs to fetishize duties done for their own sake. It would be a mistake for public officials to do likewise, not least because it is impossible. The fixation on motives makes absolutely no sense in the public realm, and might make precious little sense in the private one even, as Chapter 3 shows. The reason public action is required at all arises from the inability of uncoordinated individual action to achieve certain morally desirable ends. Individuals are rightly excused from pursuing those ends. The inability is real; the excuses, perfectly valid. But libertarians are right in their diagnosis, wrong in their prescription. That is the message of Chapter 2. The same thing that makes those excuses valid at the individual level – the same thing that relieves individuals of responsibility – makes it morally incumbent upon individuals to organize themselves into collective units that are capable of acting where they as isolated individuals are not. When they organize themselves into these collective units, those collective deliberations inevitably take place under very different circumstances and their conclusions inevitably take very different forms. Individuals are morally required to operate in that collective manner, in certain crucial respects. But they are practically circumscribed in how they can operate, in their collective mode. And those special constraints characterizing the public sphere of decision-making give rise to the special circumstances that make utilitarianism peculiarly apt for public policy-making, in ways set out more fully in Chapter 4. Government house utilitarianism thus understood is, I would argue, a uniquely defensible public philosophy.