European Union leaders have rejected a call by the United States to suspend intellectual property rights for Covid-19 vaccines at a meeting in Portugal, arguing that this would not fix a shortage of supply. “Today, the Anglo-Saxons block many of these ingredients and vaccines,” French president Emmanuel Macron said on arrival to the summit. “It is not really about intellectual property. Can you give intellectual property to laboratories that do not know how to produce and will not produce tomorrow? There have also been manufacturing agreements between pharmaceutical companies to increase production, including between Sanofi and Pfizer, and Novartis and Johnson & Johnson.

Source: The Irish Times May 08, 2021 10:30 UTC