Minssen answered questions on the prospect of an IP waiver under the TRIPS agreement, organized by the German-American Conference at Harvard E.V. Podcast provided important insights on the following issue: Patents and Intellectual Property (IP) rights on medicines are usually justified as necessary to allow pharmaceutical companies and manufacturers to recoup their investment into the development of pharmaceuticals by providing exclusive rights in a particular invention over a certain period of time. During times of humanitarian crises, such as the HIV epidemic in South Africa, the Ebola epidemic or the COVID-19 pandemic, an increasing number of voices have identified patents as the primary obstacle to more equitable access to life-saving treatments and vaccines. While high-income countries can afford to pay for expensive medicines, low-and middle income countries cannot always afford those technologies. Critics of the current patent system have thus been demanding to temporarily push back against patents on essential pharmaceuticals and allow for generic manufacturing at cost.