By Andrew Karpan

Law360 (May 21, 2021, 9:00 PM EDT ) Leaders from the world's largest economies, including Vice President Kamala Harris, reached an agreement on Friday to support voluntary licensing of intellectual property covering COVID-19 vaccines, in a move that shows many countries are still reluctant to support a U.S.-backed World Trade Organization proposal to waive IP rights.

A declaration issued in Rome at the end of an international health summit failed to mention the proposal to waive aspects of the WTO's Council for Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, or TRIPS, agreement, and instead focused on ways that G-20 members could work "consistently within" the treaty's framework.

The declaration was at odds with U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai's announcement earlier this month that the Biden administration would now support an effort led by India and South Africa to waive parts of the TRIPS agreement in order to make COVID-19 vaccines more widely available.

Instead, Friday's agreement focused on commitments to existing international vaccine distribution efforts like the World Health Organization's COVAX initiative and only backed "the use of tools such as voluntary licencing agreements of intellectual property, voluntary technology and knowhow transfers, and patent pooling on mutually-agreed terms."

While Harris did not address the waiver in her public remarks, WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, who followed her, did.

"We must act now to get all ambassadors to the table to negotiate a text," Okonjo-Iweala said Friday regarding the TRIPS waiver.

"I'm hopeful that by July we can make progress on a text," Okonjo-Iweala said, adding that, by December, she hoped "members can agree on a pragmatic framework that offers developing countries near automaticity in access to innovation while also preserving incentives for research and innovation."

Humanitarian groups that backed the proposed waiver at the WTO condemned the G-20's collective decision to only support voluntary measures.

"According to current vaccine distribution plans, less developed countries will not receive enough doses to achieve widespread coverage until at least 2023 — and millions of people will continue to die," Tamaryn Nelson, a health adviser for Amnesty International, said in response to an early draft of Friday's agreement.

Nelson indicated that the waiver's biggest opponents were coming from G-20 members in Western Europe, namely the U.K. and the EU, home to major COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers AstraZeneca PLC and BioNTech SE.

On Friday, the waiver's backers at WTO issued their latest draft of their proposed agreement. Late last month, TRIPS Council Ambassador Dagfinn Sørli of Norway announced that the proposal's supporters were revising their proposal in a search to find common ground and in advance of the international trade organization's next official meeting on the subject in early June.

According to the text of the latest proposal, intellectual property protections would be waived for at least three years from when the agreement takes effect, and it would cover all "health products and technologies" used "for the prevention, treatment or containment of COVID-19."

This keeps the proposal at odds, however, with the language of Tai's endorsement. Tai had narrowed U.S. support to only waiving "protections for COVID-19 vaccines" and, since then, she's faced skepticism from Republican members of Congress who labeled even that move a "giveaway to China."

--Additional reporting by Ryan Davis. Editing by Nicole Bleier.

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