GENEVA: An international agreement on waiving intellectual property rights for COVID-19 vaccines is within reach ahead of a global trade meeting next week, the head of the World Trade Organization said on Wednesday .
"If we get one or two deliverables that will be good," Okonjo-Iweala told Reuters in a telephone interview."I think we are within shouting distance of that." Instead, Okonjo-Iweala described a"hectic" atmosphere in Geneva where negotiators had been working late nights and weekends in order to try to resolve outstanding differences.
"There's some difficult areas we are dealing with but there's movement," she said on those talks, without elaborating."I think it's still possible for us to be able to clean that up," she said.Some recent disagreements have centred on the scope of the waiver and China's objection to some of the agreement's wording, trade sources say.