PORTO – European Union leaders said Friday that the most pressing impediments to COVID-19 vaccine supplies are not intellectual property rights but export bans and production capacity issues that need to be addressed before patent waivers should be considered.
In the wake of the United States backing calls to waive patents on vaccine technology, French President Emmanuel Macron summarized the view from Europe when he said on the sidelines of an EU summit, “You can give the intellectual property to laboratories that do not know how to produce it.
They won’t produce it tomorrow.” Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez gave the idea endorsed by U.S. President Joe Biden this week a guarded welcome, but he immediately added, “We believe it is