Thank you very much for the question.
I agree with you that the patents are not the primary barrier, which is why I do not think the TRIPS waiver will be particularly effective. However, that's not to say that IP, broadly speaking, is not an issue at all.
I would distinguish between two things. One is the legal right to produce a product, which is what the patent would cover, roughly speaking. There are some intricacies here, but it's the legal right to produce a product. The other is the knowledge, the know-how, the trade secrets, the proprietary info required to actually do so.
There's a process called “technology transfer” whereby an originator company can impart this knowledge to a generic manufacturing firm. There are still generic manufacturing firms who are saying that they have the capacity to produce and are not doing so and that they have not received technology transfer or that information from the originators.
The specifics of any individual case are a little bit hard to parse. It's hard to parse the economics of whether this is actually viable to do and scale up, or whether they actually have the necessary capabilities. It's on a case-by-case basis.
However, I think what we would like to see is a bit more pressure being placed on pharmaceutical companies—and they're already doing this. I'm not trying to say that none of this is happening. It is. We would, however, like to see a process whereby they are evaluating tech transfer and voluntary licensing opportunities and making use of the capacity that does exist.
None of this is a magic bullet, but to the extent we can feed and motivate rapid evaluation and discovery of such capacity and help facilitate voluntary licensing deals—which, by the way, would protect IP within the balance of that licensing deal.... This is not about freeing IP for everyone. It's about a voluntary process of technology and product knowledge transfer and sharing.