Addressing the General Council of the World Trade Organization (WTO), Argentina ratified its view that Covid-19 vaccines must be universal public goods so that all countries have equitable access to them and to medical innovations developed to fight the pandemic.
Therefore, bearing in mind that extraordinary situations require extraordinary solutions, Argentina endorsed South Africa and India's proposal at the WTO Council for Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) to suspend intellectual property rights for medical products, including vaccines, that are necessary for the prevention and treatment of Covid-19.
In line with President Alberto Fernández and Foreign Minister Felipe Solá's statements at the G20 and various multilateral fora, the Argentine delegation, headed by Ambassador Federico Villegas Beltrán, highlighted that, given the magnitude of the current sanitary crisis, all initiatives that seek to guarantee equitable access, promote effective technological transfers, increase capacities for local production and global vaccine distribution must be considered immediately and in a complementary way.
Villegas Beltrán warned against the profound inequality that has characterized global administration and distribution of vaccines, entailing the health risk of the virus becoming endemic and generating reservoirs of infection with the capacity of mutating into more aggressive and contagious variants.
