The WTO’s TRIPS Coun­cil is meet­ing to­day and to­mor­row to dis­cuss a Covid-19 vac­cine IP waiv­er that re­mains di­vi­sive and un­like­ly to be adopt­ed thanks to Eu­ro­pean op­po­si­tion, but which pro­po­nents still think could un­lock more vac­cine dos­es for low and mid­dle-in­come coun­tries.

Fol­low­ing the meet­ings this week, it’s ex­pect­ed there will be a bet­ter sense if some kind of waiv­er can be agreed to by De­cem­ber, Tahir Amin, an IP lawyer and co-ex­ec­u­tive di­rec­tor of I-Mak, told End­points News.

But he said that the odds of meet­ing the De­cem­ber dead­line are “al­ready look­ing slim giv­en the block­ing coun­tries’ time wast­ing with re­dun­dant counter pro­pos­als that of­fer more of a failed IP trad­ing sys­tem and the US not putting its whole weight in­to ne­go­ti­a­tions and an ac­tu­al text.”

De­spite ini­tial sup­port from the Biden ad­min­is­tra­tion, the bio­phar­ma in­dus­try and Eu­ro­pean coun­tries — pre­dom­i­nant­ly the UK, Ger­many and Switzer­land — have re­mained firm­ly op­posed to the waiv­er. Pfiz­er went so far as to call it a “dis­trac­tion” and Mod­er­na CEO Stéphane Ban­cel said it wouldn’t help sup­ply any more mR­NA vac­cines over the next two years.

Even some promi­nent De­moc­rats are now rais­ing doubts about the waiv­er too.

Gary Locke, for­mer Com­merce Sec­re­tary and am­bas­sador to Chi­na un­der the Oba­ma ad­min­is­tra­tion, told End­points via email, “The pro­posed TRIPS waiv­er would do noth­ing to ex­pand mR­NA man­u­fac­tur­ing ca­pac­i­ty. Every sci­en­tist and com­pa­ny that knows how to make the vac­cines is al­ready work­ing to scale pro­duc­tion. And every fa­cil­i­ty on earth that can safe­ly and re­li­ably pro­duce shots is do­ing so.”

He al­so said he didn’t think the US should give away its tax­pay­er-fund­ed mR­NA re­search to coun­tries like Chi­na as that could “jeop­ar­dize Amer­i­can eco­nom­ic com­pet­i­tive­ness.”

But non­prof­its like Pub­lic Cit­i­zen have called on the US gov­ern­ment to start build­ing new sites and retro­fitting old­er ones to make more vac­cines.

“A $25 bil­lion in­vest­ment in vac­cine pro­duc­tion by the US gov­ern­ment would pro­duce enough vac­cine for low- and mid­dle-in­come coun­tries in one year,” the group says.

Locke agreed that wealthy na­tions “should fo­cus on do­nat­ing sur­plus Covid-19 vac­cine dos­es to de­vel­op­ing coun­tries, while al­so in­vest­ing in so­lu­tions to ac­tu­al­ly help dis­trib­ute those dos­es. For ex­am­ple, The De­mo­c­ra­t­ic Re­pub­lic of the Con­go re­turned 1.3 mil­lion dos­es to CO­V­AX, the glob­al vac­ci­na­tion-shar­ing ini­tia­tive, in part be­cause it couldn’t get the dos­es in­to rur­al ar­eas.”

Over the next two days, all eyes will be on the IP waiv­er, and whether it can ac­tu­al­ly ramp up vac­cine sup­plies.

“I’m hop­ing, al­beit not con­fi­dent, the US will ta­ble some lan­guage/text in sup­port of the In­dia/South Africa’s waiv­er — even if it does not to­tal­ly match the cur­rent re­vised waiv­er text. It will be need­ed to push the coun­tries block­ing to come with some­thing more in line with a broad­er IP waiv­er,” Amin said.

Steve Holtzman was awoken by a 1 a.m. call from a doctor at Duke University asking if he could put some pigs on a plane and fly them from Ohio to North Carolina that day. A motorcyclist had gotten into a horrific crash, the doctor explained. He believed the pigs’ livers, sutured onto the patient’s skin like an external filter, might be able to tide the young man over until a donor liver became available.

David Livingston, the Dana-Farber/Harvard Med scientist who helped shine a light on some of the key molecular drivers of breast and ovarian cancer, died unexpectedly last Sunday.

One of the senior leaders at Dana-Farber during his nearly half century of work there, Livingston was credited with shedding light on the genes that regulate cell growth, with insights into inherited BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations that helped lay the scientific foundation for targeted therapies and earlier detection that have transformed the field.

Pfizer will present its case to the FDA’s vaccine adcomm next week, seeking authorization for a lower-dose version of its Covid-19 vaccine for kids ages 5 through 12, which the Biden administration said will likely begin rolling out early next month.

Two primary doses of the 10 µg vaccine (the dose for those ages 12 and up is 30 μg) given 3 weeks apart in this group of children “have shown a favorable safety and tolerability profile, robust immune responses against all variants of concern including Delta, and vaccine efficacy of 90.7% against laboratory-confirmed symptomatic COVID-19,” the company said in briefing documents ahead of next Tuesday’s meeting of the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee.