
Lawmakers in the House and Senate have called for the US government to waive patents on COVID-19 vaccines.Relaxing/Waiving Intellectual Property Protections Assist in bolstering regulatory and safety capacity for COVID-19 manufacturing in LMICs.Incentivize or require companies to participate in WHO’s mRNA vaccine technology transfer hub.Incentivize or require technology transfer between current manufacturers and those in other countries.Provide incentives such as financing and/or advance purchase guarantees, or a “technology buyout”.Intervene more directly and more aggressively in support of additional partnerships.Administration helped broker production partnerships and licensing agreements between companies to spur vaccine manufacturing, including financial incentives.

Prioritized production and export of materials and supplies vaccine manufacturing in India.Administration enacted Defense Production Act to prioritize COVID-19 vaccine materials/supplies.Provide funding for other global/regional vaccine procurement and distribution efforts such as via the World Bank, or the African Union.Appropriate additional funding for Gavi/COVAX.has already provided $2.5 billion, and is the single largest donor to COVAX. Congress appropriated $4 billion to Gavi for COVID-19 vaccine procurement and distribution via COVAX, with $2 billion provided initially and another $2 billion provided contingent upon other donor support for Gavi/COVAX.owned vaccines, through COVAX or other mechanism Provide multilateral donations of U.S.Provide further bilateral or regional donations of U.S.Administration announced an additional 20 million other U.S.-owned and authorized vaccines will be donated by the end of June.Administration announced 60 million AstraZeneca doses to be donated after FDA safety review.Administration “loaned” up to 4 million U.S.-owned doses of AstraZeneca to Mexico and Canada.Table 1: Summary of Primary Policy Options for Expanding Global Access to COVID-19 Vaccines, and U.S. Relaxing or waiving intellectual property (patent) restrictions on COVID-19 vaccine technologies.Helping to expand vaccine manufacturing.Providing additional funding for global vaccine efforts such as COVAX.



The same cannot be said for the majority of countries around the world, especially low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) where access has been limited and will remain so for some time. is expected to soon have enough COVID-19 vaccine doses on hand to fully vaccinate just about everyone in the country once, and, with additional doses already purchased, could likely vaccinate the population twice over.
