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.
Days before the meeting starts, none of the agreements in the three major negotiating areas of agriculture, fish subsidies or intellectual property rights for vaccines have been finalized for ministers to rubber-stamp, trade sources say. “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.