Mr. Oliver O'Connor:

On the first point, the situation we are at today in which there are more vaccines available than the African countries are ready and capable of accepting shows that the IP rights have not been the barrier to the production of sufficient vaccines to be administered in Africa at this time.

To go to the point about whether the TRIPS waiver would harm innovation, we have evidence on this which we can send to the committee afterwards. The study by the European Patent Office showed that a waiver would lead to a 37% drop in investment in research and development for vaccines and therapeutics and that this effect would be felt in both developing and developed countries. The reason is that vaccines, like medicines, are created, funded and researched by capital that comes from both the public and the private sectors, but predominantly the private sector. Any uncertainty in what are the rules of the game in advance will have a dampening effect on the willingness or ability of companies to raise funds for investment in very risky research. One has to look right back to the earliest part of the process of the development of vaccines and therapies to see that this is where the investment in Europe of €35 billion a year by the pharmaceutical industry happens. It is not sufficient to look at it simply at the point where there is production of the vaccine and all the manufacturing processes that are protected by intellectual property rights. It is not sufficient only to look at a certain point that they are actually developed. One has to look right back to the start to see how does the investment in risky research happen. Creating an uncertainty about the outcome at the end point has a dampening effect on the ability to raise funds to invest in risky ventures, especially where many of the results do not come through. That is the fundamental economic point here about how vaccines and medicines actually get developed.