Assessing the viability of access and benefit-sharing models of equitable distribution of vaccines in international law

Developing and distributing a COVID-19 vaccine is key to the global response strategy. How a resulting vaccine will, and ought to, be distributed is a vital question; encompassing fairness, equity, and justice for developing countries, who are likely to have poor access to a COVID-19 vaccine without some form of framework guiding allocation at the international level. It is likely that any such framework will be developed through the World Health Assembly, and there are already calls for the WHO to develop such a framework to guide the distribution of any resulting vaccine. Within international law there exist two international legal agreements upon which to model a COVID-19 distribution framework: the WHO Pandemic Influenza Preparedness Framework, and the UN Nagoya Protocol to the CBD. These agreements take significantly different approaches to equitable distribution and the operationalisation of the distribution. This project will assess these international agreements suitability for providing a model for COVID-19 vaccine distribution. This project uses doctrinal legal analysis and legal epidemiology to assess the extent to which these international agreements can provide a legally robust framework on which to model an agreement to ensure ethical distribution of a COVID-19 vaccine upon. From this the project will provide 'lessons learned' from the analysis of the WHO Pandemic Influenza Preparedness Framework, and the UN Nagoya Protocol to the CBD, to inform the development of a COVID-19 vaccine distribution through the World Health Assembly.