Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

As I mentioned earlier, the announcement from the US yesterday is very significant and has caused the EU and other developed countries to reassess their position on this matter. This pandemic is raging across the world. Records are being broken every day in terms of the number of new cases. If we are going to get the virus under control, we need to get it under control everywhere. That means vaccinating everyone in the world and doing to Covid-19 what we did to polio and small pox. If we do not do that, the virus could be re-imported into the West and variants will develop that could be resistant to vaccines. However, as I mentioned earlier, just giving somebody the recipe is not enough. If they do not have a kitchen, kitchen skills or the ingredients, it will not make a practical difference in terms of the production of vaccines. That is why it makes sense to have a comprehensive agreement, ideally with the companies and the manufacturers of the materials on board because they are the ones with the know-how. That is the approach that is going to be taken in the WTO.

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