Legal and ethical issues
around COVID-19 and vaccines
While the pandemic has triggered a frantic struggle to find and produce 'the' vaccine(s) that may resolve the crisis, and while it has tested public and private health organizations as
well as the population like never before, many states are now running against time to register
safe and effective vaccines and obtain sufficient volumes of doses to administer them to their
citizens. Based on a variety of technologies coming from difference sources, framed by various regulatory regimes and feeding a diversity of regions and population segments, vaccines
against COVID-19 are raising a series of legal and ethical issues such as equity of access, consent, intellectual property, product distribution, immunization records and passports, privacy,
adverse events and liability.
Under the coordination of Cécile Théard-Jallu, Partner at De Gaulle Fleurance & Associés
and Alison Choy Flannigan, Partner at Hall and Wilcox, respectively acting as its Vice-Chair and
Newsletter Officer, the Healthcare and Life Sciences Committee of the International Bar Association (IBA) has collected a series of twenty articles dealing with these issues around COVID-19
and vaccines, written by leading health and life sciences lawyers from across Europe, Central
and South America and the Asia Pacific region.
As an introduction, Mr Jean-Claude Muller did the IBA Healthcare and Life Sciences Committee the honour of contributing an editorial to the publication. With a PhD in chemistry,
Jean-Claude Muller has spent almost 30 years at Sanofi becoming the Global Senior Vice-President of Prospective and Strategic Initiatives, and is in charge of establishing long-term strategic
corporate development plans. He also was the Founding President of the 'Pôle de Compétitivité Medicen Paris Region', the Paris Region Biomedical Sciences Cluster. Jean-Claude has
subsequently founded Innovation & International Relationship (I&IR), a French consulting
company, which aims to construct and implement strategic plans for innovative companies,
supporting them with developing international business relationships with a special focus on
building new businesses between Europe and Asia. Jean-Claude is also the Executive Editor of
BtoBioInnovation, which publishes newsletters and reports with international outreach related
to the biopharmaceutical industry. Throughout his career, Jean-Claude has gained impressive
experience allowing him to share views on key evolutions and stakes of the pharmaceutical and
life sciences industry and is sharing some observations on life after the COVID-19 crisis with us
in: 'Warp speed: the new normal?'