Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I congratulate the American people on sacking Donald Trump. It is very gratifying to see his increasingly desperate and farcical attempts to deny reality. It reminds me a little bit of Chemical Ali trying to claim that Saddam Hussein was still in charge when the walls were shaking around him. It is amusing but people hope it will bring real change, not least given the absolutely disastrous manner in which Donald Trump dealt with Covid-19. The Taoiseach mentioned that and I want to ask him about it.

An issue that is emerging relates to the intellectual property rights of big pharma, which is heavily based in the United States and this country. Big pharma is using intellectual property rights, and essentially its desire to make a profit from vaccines, to prevent their adequate roll-out throughout the world, which is critical. Trump wanted to buy up all the vaccine for America and this is happening in Europe and so on. It would be a disastrous strategy because it would lead to many parts of the world not having the vaccine, resulting in the likelihood of mutations and the vaccine becoming effectively useless and ineffective for all of us. It is absolutely critical that intellectual property rights in respect of propriety technology and the means to produce vaccines once they are declared safe be waived. We need emergency measures - legislation, if necessary - to waive the normal intellectual property rules for the vaccine in order that we can end this pandemic and that profit will not get in the way of that.

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