Dr. Kieran Harkin:

In reply to some of Deputy O'Reilly's questions on capacity, it is worth bearing in mind that this time last year, there were no Covid vaccines available.

We have come a long way in a relatively short time. While the mRNA vaccine is a very sophisticated vaccine, some of the advantages are that it can be produced quite quickly and the manufacturing set-up can be done in a relatively short time, within three months. It is interesting that Knowledge Ecology International, KEI, an international organisation, has identified more than 100 plants capable of producing Covid vaccine. Six of those are in Ireland, four from Merck, which had attempted to develop its own vaccine which failed recently. Two of the plants are in Cork, one in Carlow and one in Swords.

On what Ireland should do on the waiver on the national stage, our priority would be for Ireland to support CETA but we would also suggest that the waiver or the suspension of intellectual property rights in relation to Covid-19 products as proposed by the Indian and South African governments also warrants support.

On when a patent has been suspended and used from before, it has happened a number of times. It is what brought an end to the HIV epidemic in Africa when the pharmaceutical industry and the governments which support them caved in under pressure and relented and allowed HIV drugs to be produced and manufactured generically. Notable times this happened was when the US Government was threatened by anthrax and overnight brought in a law lifting patents on ciprofloxacin, the only antibiotic that would have been effective. There are other examples which I do not have to hand.