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 U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai said on Thursday the Biden
administration was working on multiple fronts to end the pandemic.
"Extraordinary circumstances call for extraordinary measures," Tai
told a virtual town hall for union members hosted by the AFL-CIO
trade federation.
That effort included donations of 80 million vaccine doses by the
end of June, additional donations of 500 million doses announced on
Thursday by President Joe Biden, and negotiations at the World Trade
Organization (WTO) to secure a limited waiver of intellectual
property (IP) rights for vaccines, she said.
"And this may take time, given the complexity of the issues
involved, but our goal remains to get vaccines to as many people as
fast as possible," Tai said, adding that the pandemic would not be
over until it was contained everywhere.
Biden's plan to donate 500 million more doses - a key element in the
G7's plan for 1 billion donations - raised some questions about
whether Washington could drop its support for an IP waiver at the
WTO.
The waiver is opposed by Germany, Britain and some other U.S.
allies, as well the U.S. business community.
But Biden administration officials say the waiver will help boost
global production of coronavirus vaccines.
Biden on Thursday said the crisis, like the earlier AIDS epidemic,
demands a global response and that failing to halt the pandemic
would restrain global growth and could increase instability in some
countries.
"We’re going to keep manufacturing doses, donating doses, getting
'jabs' - as they say here in the UK - in arms, until the world has
beaten this virus," he said.
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 Sean Flynn, an expert on
intellectual property at American University
Washington, said he expects the WTO to reach a
deal on a waiver during a ministerial meeting
later this year.
He welcomed the U.S. "ideological flexibility"
of pursuing both a waiver and taking steps to
boost donations of vaccines, and said new virus
mutations underscored the need for production of
vaccines by more than the few players in rich
countries. U.S. Treasury
Secretary Janet Yellen said on Thursday some two dozen low-income
countries had only vaccinated 1% of their population. "America is
better off in a wealthier, vaccinated world than a poorer,
unvaccinated one," she said.
The pharmaceutical industry argues that companies invested their own
funds to develop vaccines and waiving their IP rights will undermine
such work in the future.
Robert Grant, senior director of international affairs at the U.S.
Chamber of Commerce’s Global Innovation Policy Center, said there
was "no evidence" that waiving intellectual property rights would
boost vaccine production.
"The concern is that countries all around the world will just start
saying, 'Well, we're not going to implement or enforce IP laws'," he
said, adding that the result would be a chaotic patchwork of laws
that would "undermine the rationale for investment in these places
for years."
(Reporting by Andrea Shalal; editing by Kieran Murray)
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