2025, Vol. 5, Issue 2, Part F

This paper examines how Intellectual Property (IP) protection embedded in international trade agreements systematically shapes access to medical technologies and reproduces global health inequities. Rather than functioning as neutral tools to promote innovation, contemporary IP regimes operate as policy instruments that concentrate technological control and economic benefits in wealthy countries while constraining access to essential medicines, vaccines, and diagnostics in Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs). Drawing on legal analysis, policy frameworks, and comparative national experiences, the paper demonstrates that current arrangements generate predictable public health consequences, including high medicine prices, delayed treatment, limited manufacturing capacity, and persistent dependence on patent-holding firms. The analysis shows that these outcomes are not inevitable results of innovation incentives but reflect deliberate institutional choices embedded in the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) and reinforced through bilateral and regional trade agreements. While TRIPS formally contains flexibilities such as compulsory licensing and parallel importation, their practical use remains politically constrained by trade pressure, economic retaliation, and asymmetric power relations. The COVID-19 pandemic further exposed the limitations of existing frameworks, as intellectual property protections restricted vaccine and technology sharing despite an unprecedented global health emergency. Although crisis-driven reforms, including a limited TRIPS waiver, demonstrated that change is politically possible, their narrow scope underscored the resilience of intellectual property maximalism. The paper argues that achieving equitable access to medical technologies requires structural reform rather than incremental adjustment. This includes rebalancing IP protection and public health priorities, strengthening manufacturing capacity in LMICs, eliminating TRIPS-plus provisions, and explicitly subordinating intellectual property claims to the right to health.