Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 11 May 2022

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation

WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights and Covid-19 Vaccines: Discussion

Mr. Dimitri Eynikel:

As a figure like this, no. We know the death rate but I cannot say which of these people have died specifically as a result of that. That is an impossible or very difficult calculation to make. Let us be careful about putting numbers to that exactly. This does not mean that the TRIPS waiver will not help to reduce that number, particularly for treatments. Let us not forget to discuss treatments. We have talked a lot about vaccines so far but when we are talking about access to treatments there is a serious problem right now. There are countries particularly in Latin America that are completely cut off from access to Covid-19 treatments. I am sure that Dr. Kelly can talk more about them. They can save lives. They are very easy to produce. They are cheap. People do not have access to them because of intellectual property rights.

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