Directions: Read the given passage and answer the questions that follow.

On 5 May, Katherine Tai, the United States Trade Representative, announced that the US would support waiving intellectual property protections for COVID-19 vaccines. This was a significant breakthrough for negotiations at the World Trade Organization, where developing countries led by India and South Africa have pushed for the relaxation of the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, or TRIPS, rules for all COVID-19 technologies to improve access to them. After the US, the European Union, New Zealand, and Canada have said they will consider the proposal. However, the extent of support from these countries for such a waiver will come down to the fine print of any agreement reached by the WTO. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which is a major funder for many global public health and vaccine organizations with an outsize influence on global health policy, said it would support only a “narrow waiver” on COVID-19 vaccines.

While these talks have been on, COVID-19 vaccines have been unequally distributed around the world. Rich countries signed agreements to buy up the bulk when vaccines were still being developed. Many players are involved in the development and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines—countries and their governments; research institutions such as Oxford University; and pharmaceutical companies such as AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, Moderna, Novavax, and the Serum Institute of India. Global alliances have also been participating in the process, such as GAVI, which is a global alliance facilitating vaccine production and distribution, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations or CEPI, and COVAX, an alliance specifically to coordinate distribution of COVID-19 vaccines that is led by GAVI and CEPI. The Gates Foundation helped set up both GAVI and CEPI and had contributed to funding COVAX.

According to Kamal-Yanni, the players involved in vaccine development have themselves repelled mechanisms to ensure fair vaccine distribution. She detailed the many hurdles to equitable vaccine distribution, the main one being pressure from pharmaceutical companies.

This situation came about for 2 reasons, First, from last year when universities and pharmaceutical companies started to research vaccines, it was clear that the majority of the population in the world must be vaccinated to reach herd immunity. That means, anybody could have calculated how many doses are needed and even if all the vaccines in the clinical trial succeeded, those companies would not be able to produce all these billions of doses that are needed. A simple calculation would have told you that. The world leaders should have thought about how to produce these many doses, allocate and distribute them. That did not happen.

What happened led to the second problem, which is that countries that had money hoarded the vaccine. So, a country like Israel [which is 56 percent fully vaccinated] made a deal with Pfizer to vaccinate its population, went ahead by offering Pfizer some incentives in terms of money and paid up to get the number of doses they wanted. It is the same case with the UK and the US that used legal and other means to get all the potential vaccines, and then allocated millions of doses for their populations. The EU also tried to secure this. They actually didn't get it yet.

So we have a problem of lack of supply and then we have a problem of little supply that we have not distributed fairly. With these two problems, of course, the people who suffer are people of developing countries.