From the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to a Pandemic Treaty: Will a Right to Medicines Forever be ‘Under Construction’?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Global disparities in access to COVID-19 vaccines have illuminated long-standing tensions between intellectual property rights and the right to health. Debates over solutions to these disparities have focused on a waiver to the TRIPS Agreement and a prospective pandemic treaty which will attempt to regulate the impact of intellectual property rights on access to essential pandemic health goods. These disparities and debates underscore the imperative for effective legal solutions capable of addressing the restrictive impact of intellectual property rights on the affordability and production of essential health products. Yet from a legal perspective, a claim for affordable medicines is at its essence a fundamental human right, especially that of the right to health. While the right to health has long been entrenched within international human rights law, the legal and political force of a right to medicines is less clear. Accordingly, this article broadly analyses the legal and political state of play of a right to medicines in international law. It proceeds in the following ways: (1) it explores how health fits into the conceptual foundations of human rights; (2) it considers evidence from international law and policy of the legal and political emergence of a right to medicines as part of rights to health and science; (3) it considers the implications of the TRIPS waiver and of a prospective pandemic treaty for the development of this right; (4) it concludes with thoughts about what these developments imply for the legal and political force of a right to medicines in international law.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.021 | 0.030 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.019 | 0.023 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".