Marie Sherlock (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for attending. I thank the Chair for facilitating this debate, which many of us have pushed for for a long time. I thank People's Vaccine Alliance Ireland for its persistence, including all the involved groups and those who have campaigned for a TRIPS waiver to ensure we can have this hearing. The Labour Party supports the TRIPS waiver. It is unacceptable that low- and middle-income countries would effectively be deprived of the ability to build up their own capacity to develop vaccines, particularly when millions of lives are at stake.

There was a discussion about rules and the changing of rules. I acknowledge what Mr. O'Connor said, but it is important that we all accept that there will always be resistance from industry to the changing of rules. We see this with the corporate tax rate. The Irish Pharmaceutical Healthcare Association made comments about resisting changes to the 12.5% rate. It is only when state actors make decisions such as the Clinton Administration on HIV medication the 1990s that we see radical change. While we can ask the IPHA and the pharmaceutical industry to step up to the mark, change only happens when our Government, the European Union and other global actors make decisions.

Much has been made of how future innovation will be threatened by a TRIPS waiver, yet we understand that on foot of the breakthrough in South Africa, which is an mRNA hub, patents were lodged to effectively scupper the roll-out of the generic vaccine developed there.

Aggressive tactics were used by pharmaceutical companies to block the South African experiment. I ask the contributors to go into detail about what happened in that instance and I ask the IPHA to also comment.