Dr. Christine Kelly:

I might be able to pick up on some of those points. The first point, on innovation, is really important. I am an infectious-diseases physician and also work in academia. My job is really to prescribe pharmaceutical interventions to people every day, so I understand the key role of research and development and innovation in driving forward patient health. On that point, I agree with my colleagues from the pharmaceutical industry. However, a pandemic presents a very different scenario, for two reasons. First, an infection, by nature, is transmissible from person to person. An intervention will potentially interrupt transmission chains, which makes it different. Second, when there is a pandemic, you are not dealing with one specific country but with the entire global population. You eventually get to the point where if you are protecting your patent to drive profits for further innovation, the innovation you are protecting will not be capable of being used for certain populations. The key issue I have with the current model is that we have got to the point where the innovation falls into this category in respect of certain populations of people. That is bad for medical ethics, interrupting transmission and public health. There has to be a balance. There has to be a point at which we say enough is enough and that we now need to regulate what happens in terms of protecting the patents and making sure the product is available to everybody who needs it.