 For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Over half of the 12.5 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses that pharma companies are planning to produce this year have already been booked by wealthier countries. This means barely 13% of the world's population will get immunity against COVID-19 this year. Estimates suggest that the mass of the population in wealthier countries are likely to be vaccinated against COVID-19 by mid of the year 2022. However, in poor economies, mass immunization will take until 2024 if it happens at all. These countries will pay the cost of this delay in the form of 2.5 million avoidable deaths. What is standing in the way of expanding production and carrying out mass vaccination campaigns across the world? Under the current intellectual property rights regime, a majority of the world's population cannot get vaccinated against COVID-19 before the year 2024. Now, global pressure is building on world trade organization members to temporarily sustain certain intellectual property rights on COVID-19 vaccines and related products. 280 members of the European Parliament and the parliaments of different European countries have been urging the European Union to concede to this proposal. In the US as well, a group of 60 lawmakers, mostly from the democratic party, pressed US President Joe Biden on the same demand. This proposal was first tabled at the World Trade Organization by India and South Africa in October 2020. It calls on member countries to suspend the sections pertaining to patents, copyrights, industrial designs and trade secrets in the TRIPS Agreement for medicines and instruments required to trade COVID-19 and immunize the population against it. The TRIPS Agreement, or the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, is an international legal agreement between all the member nations of the World Trade Organization. Suspending the copyrights and patents section in this agreement for COVID-19 vaccines and medicines will allow for the scaling up of production of these vaccines and medicines. It will allow for the capacities of the general pharmaceutical industries in developing countries to be utilized. This is a pressing imperative for the populations in the global south to achieve mass immunity. Another hurdle in the way to mass immunization is the higher costs poorer countries are being charged for vaccines. For instance, European Union member countries pay around $2 per dose of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine, which is the cheapest vaccine available. At the same time, South Africa pays more than twice as much. This is despite the fact that trials for this vaccine were conducted in South Africa. Moreover, Uganda, which is even poorer, pays around four times as much. The proposal put forward by India and South Africa was to overcome such barriers to mass immunization globally. But they received a poor response within the WTO as even developing countries were skeptical about this working. They did not think pharmaceutical companies will ever share their patents. But now civil society groups, labour unions, doctors organizations such as MSF and academic institutions across the globe have picked this up as an agenda. They have campaigned around the fact that massive public funds have been funneled into the research and development of the vaccine. Experts have pointed out that $19 billion of public money has been funneled into big pharma through various means to fund COVID-19 vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics between January to September 2020. Support for the proposal at WTO for suspension of patents has been increasing over the last few months. Currently over 100 member countries, that is about a two-third majority, predominantly from the developing world have expressed support. The implementation of the proposal, however, requires a consensus among all the 163 members. The US, UK, EU, Canada, Australia and its allies continue to lead the charge to block the consensus. It is believed that the temporary suspension of the copyright related sections in the TRIPS Agreement will help ramp up production to a level that is sufficient to meet the needs of the global population by mid of 2022. Another factor to consider is the lack of political will. At the conclusion of the 46th session of the UN Human Rights Council on March 23, over 130 countries adopted a resolution urging all states to not take any measures that could impact timely and universal access to COVID-19 vaccines. The resolution does not explicitly call for the waiver of sections in the TRIPS Agreement, but it still reaffirms the right of states to use the flexibilities in the agreement which were restated in the Doha Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement. Experts point out that building on the basis of the Doha Declaration and pushing for the suspension of the four sections of TRIPS is a diplomatic feat which requires strong unity among developing countries. This unity is hard to find at the moment. For instance, Brazil, which used to be a leading player in the third world struggle against the stranglehold of Big Pharma, has switched over entirely to the US camp under the leadership of Hairball Sonaro. On the other hand, India, which co-sponsor the proposal, has also not invested sufficient political capital for its implementation. India is pursuing two mutually irreconcilable objectives to get intimate with the US on the one hand and to have affordable access to the vaccine on the other. The situation is similar in many other developing countries where governments are supporting the motion, but they have not mustered sufficient political will to act against the Western governments and their allies backing the Big Pharma in the WTO. Under the circumstances, the task of getting these IPR hurdles out of the way to prevent millions of avoidable deaths remains an uphill battle for civil society and unions across the world.