Switzerland - Covid vaccines: how to end the wait for billions of people

(MENAFN- Swissinfo) Português (pt) Como acabar com a espera de bilhões de pessoas pela vacina contra a Covid

Proponents of a waiver say it would ease access to these life-saving products. But others, including Switzerland, say it is not the solution. Talks could come to a head at a ministerial conference of the World Trade Organization (WTO) starting on November 30 in Geneva.

More than a hundred of the WTO's 164 member countries back an India-South Africa proposal for a temporary waiver under the WTO's TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) Agreement.External link The IP waiver talks have been ongoing for more than a year, but would need two-thirds of WTO member countries to support it. At present, the proposal does not have enough votes. This could lead to talks being postponed beyond the forthcoming WTO Ministerial Conference or a watered down statement being issued.

“MC12 without a waiver would be a failure,” says Yuan Qiong Hu of Doctors without Borders (MSF) in Geneva, which has been campaigning at the WTO on this issue. The idea is that more laboratories around the world could have access to the technology and produce generic versions. This, in the view of the proposal's authors, would both reduce the cost of anti-Covid vaccines in particular, and expand global production.

What's at stake?

A simple look at the numbers from the pandemic highlights the urgency of providing greater access: More than five million people worldwide have died. And even though poor countries with already weak health systems have been hard hit, more than three-quarters of the 5.5 billion Covid-19 shots administered worldwide have gone to high and upper-middle income countries, which account for just over a third of the world's population. In comparison, less than 5% of people in Africa have been vaccinated.

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MSF and other NGOs including Amnesty International say companies like Pfizer and Moderna have been using their intellectual property (IP) rights to prioritise manufacturing and supply of their vaccines in high-income countries and keep their prices up. The companies deny this. 

“The India-South Africa proposal was really born out of frustration with the slow rollout of vaccines in the developing world and a number of high-profile reports that the owners of IP relating to the vaccines in particular were not engaging in voluntary licensing,” says Duncan Matthews of the UK-based Queen Mary Intellectual Property Research Institute.

He points to reports that potential manufacturers in Bangladesh, South Africa and Canada sought voluntary licences but were refused.“So that kind of raised a big international question about, well, if there's a global pandemic, why are the owners of the IP refusing to grant voluntary licences to increase manufacturing capacity?”

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International Geneva

Julia Crawford

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