President Cyril Ramaphosa expressed optimism after a face-to-face meeting with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz renewed negotiations on the stalled attempt by SA and other developing countries to secure an intellectual property waiver for Covid-19 vaccines could make some headway.
Ramaphosa met Scholz on the sidelines of the sixth AU-EU summit in Brussels on Friday, where he sought to link the issue with the broader relationship between the EU and the continent, where the bloc’s influence has waned with the emergence of China as a key source of funding and investment.
Ramaphosa said the enforcement of the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (Trips) was hampering the ability of developing countries to manufacture their own vaccines.
Developed countries, especially those home to major pharmaceutical companies, have disputed that intellectual property rights are the main reason hampering Africa’s ability to produce vaccines, and have instead pointed to a lack of manufacturing capacity.
According to the Economist magazine, Africa accounted for just 3.6% of vaccine doses administered globally so far.
"I said in our view when we are in a pandemic like this, what will get us out should be regarded as the public good," Ramaphosa, who is also the AU’s champion on Covid-19, told journalists hours before he flew out of Brussels on Friday.
"It should not be seen as a profiteering type of instrument or product. I think that message got through to him [Scholz], and he started arguing that, you know, even the originators don’t necessarily want to make money out of it."
French President Emmanuel Macron, whose government holds the presidency of the European Council, made a point of focusing on the transfer of technology that would enable developing countries to develop vaccines as an alternative to the Trips waiver.
SA, Kenya, Senegal, Nigeria, Egypt and Tunisia were announced as countries where such tech transfer hubs would be established with EU assistance. Macron said it was the technology and not necessarily the intellectual property that would enable vaccine manufacture in the developing world.
Germany has strongly opposed a Trips waiver, mainly to protect BioNTech, which developed a messenger RNA vaccine. There are fears that the waiver could be detrimental to future investments in the company. It has also been argued that countries calling for such a waiver don’t have the capacity to manufacture these vaccines anyway.
It is hoped that a new German government would be more amenable to making concessions. Scholz was elected chancellor in December 2021 after negotiating a coalition deal with the environmentalist Greens and the neoliberal Free Democratic Party, paving the way for him to replace Angela Merkel, who served for 16 years.
SA and India have led a campaign at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) since 2020 for the intellectual property rules to be waived to achieve vaccine equity in the time of a pandemic.
They have the support of more than 100 countries and a number of non-governmental organisations.
But the process has stalled even after securing the support of US President Joe Biden.
Ramaphosa went as far as hinting that last week’s summit could be considered a failure if no agreement was reached on the waiver. "I would say the reluctance of Europe to agree to reach an agreement on the Trips waiver is what weakens the relationship [between Europe and Africa]," he said.
There were hopes that the summit — which was two years overdue — would strengthen relations between the AU and the EU.
The AU Commission and its European counterpart will try to find a compromise before meeting with WTO director-general Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala in the next couple of months.
European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen told the closing session of the summit on Friday she agreed with Ramaphosa that "there shouldn’t be excess profit by companies as long as there are regions in the world that don’t have access to vaccines".
She proposed compulsory licensing, technology transfer and "efforts to scale up production while limiting the cost of IP [intellectual property]" as a possible solution.
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