[Witness spoke in Spanish, interpreted as follows:]
Thank you very much.
We began the compulsory licence process, which is part of the multilateral norm, with TRIPS. TRIPS foresees this type of global crisis, this type of emergency, so there is the compulsory licence process and the voluntary licence process.
Bolivia, with this pharmaceutical company based in Canada, Biolyse Pharma.... The first thing it did was to see about the possibility of producing vaccines for us. First they tried to obtain a voluntary licence, to see if they could have the licence without further bureaucracy, because we were in a global crisis. They were not able to obtain that licence directly from Johnson & Johnson, which didn't respond to them, so we went the route of compulsory licences. That's the second mechanism in TRIPS under the World Trade Organization.
This process indicates that you need to have political will from the importing and the exporting country. In the case of Bolivia, we didn't have capacity at that time to produce our own vaccines, so we had to contact this Canadian company.
As an importing country, we notified the WTO, as indicated in the requirements. We said we had requested this and that we all know the pandemic is a global problem and that this mechanism should apply. However, the second part of the mechanism indicates that the exporting country also has to notify of its intention to export under the compulsory licence program. Canada needed to include the vaccines against COVID as part of an annex to products that fall under these compulsory licences. That's why we made the request for Canada to include it in that appendix, which would have meant that Biolyse Pharma would have been able to produce 15 million doses for Bolivia.
We already had the price negotiated with Biolyse Pharma. The only thing we were missing was that licence. It would have been Canada that would notify the WTO that the vaccines could be exported from its country. That's where we ran into difficulty. As I mentioned through press conferences, we received support from Canadians. We gathered 4,500 signatures. There was a petition in the House of Commons. However, the government response went otherwise. They said that they work with COVAX and that, under the WTO, they will continue working with all countries, but they didn't answer us regarding whether they would export the vaccines from Biolyse Pharma.
Basically, it hasn't been possible. We've been waiting for over a year for this authorization, and Bolivia.... I'll echo what the Doctors Without Borders representative said. The problem with supply was last year, when we didn't have direct access to vaccines. Countries like Bolivia didn't have vaccines. For future opportunities, when this type of pandemic or emergency occurs, it's important to be able to modify these processes. National standards shouldn't put bureaucratic obstacles in place.