Founded and funded by the International AIDS Funding Agency (UNITAID) since 2010, the Medicine Patent Pool (MPP) aims to increase access and facilitate drug development for low and middle income countries through an innovative approach to voluntary licensing and patent breaking.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has called on the global community to voluntarily make available the knowledge, intellectual property and data needed to confront COVID-19. According to WHO, the priority is to stop the pandemic, interrupt the transmission of the new coronavirus and reverse the consequences of future global problems. For this, WHO advocates universal access to knowledge, intellectual property, data and other technologies in progress.

Former New Zealand Prime Minister, Helen Clark, and UN Under-Secretary-General, Winnie Byanyima, wrote a hard-hitting article against the pharmaceutical industry’s monopoly. The authors acknowledge the need for an urgent vaccine to end the COVID-19 pandemic. According to them, the world is likely to need a permanent dose of the vaccine and intellectual property is one of the barriers that prevent this vaccine from being available to everyone.

According to Richard Parker, Director and President of the Brazilian Interdisciplinary AIDS Association (ABIA), “Brazil should be better positioned to deal with large health threats than many other low and middle-income countries,” says Parker. “It was always going to be a serious spread, but it didn’t have to be this way”.