Holding Up a Mirror to the World Trade Organization: Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic

ABSTRACT

[...]what of other cognate international institutions that govern the global political economy and thereby facilitate or hamper access to lifesaving medical equipment and drugs, provide a system of enforceable rules to encourage vaccine development and distribution, or ensure that populations already beleaguered by a potentially lethal contagion do not become casualties of new scarcities of essential goods and services? [...]the rapid and global spread of COVID-19 was facilitated by a model of globalization that recognizes merit in the free movement of people across borders. [...]the WTO’s rules on trade-related intellectual property rights (TRIPS) directly impact upon the issue of the accessibility of the vaccine. State-owned enterprises and subsidies in China showed a mixing of public and private power that was an anomaly to the rules-based system of free and fair markets that the liberal order had envisaged;it was, however, a good illustration of the exercise of state power on and via the private sector, along the lines outlined by the model of weaponized interdependence.