He said the recent invocation of the U.S. Defence Production Act to preserve vaccine raw materials for its own companies went against the global goal of sharing vaccines equitably.

New policies and renewals now define terms like “communicable disease” or “microorganism” – something existing policies often lacked, and which led to a flood of lawsuits that insurers have so far largely won.

An exclusion drafted by the Lloyd’s Market Association, for example, says insurers will not cover any claim “directly or indirectly arising out of, attributable to, or occurring concurrently or in any sequence with a Communicable Disease.”