South Africa on Operational Impacts and Strategy

The COVID-19 pandemic brought with it something of an IP truce, with major pharmaceutical companies seemingly happy to co-exist.

Participating countries attending the 12th Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Geneva, Switzerland reached an agreement on 17 June 2022 to partially waive intellectual property restrictions on the manufacture and production of COVID-19 vaccines for the next five years.

We don't get to discuss know-how much in our articles. Yet it is, of course, something that falls squarely within the domain of intellectual property law because know-how is often protected by patents.