Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has joined a call from activists and researchers urging President Cyril Ramaphosa to revisit SA’s position on a compromise deal that emerged last week at World Trade Organisation talks on a waiver on intellectual property rights (IP) for Covid-19 technologies, saying it will not do enough to make cheap generic vaccines and treatments available to developing countries.
Leaked documents detail a compromise position reached by negotiators for the US, EU, SA and India that could potentially end the near 18-month deadlock over the IP waiver.
In October 2020, SA and India proposed that the WTO waive patents on Covid-19 vaccines, tests and treatments for the duration of the pandemic, to enable large-scale manufacturing of generics.
The compromise proposes that only the patents on Covid-19 vaccines be waived, for up to five years. It excludes technology transfer and trade secrets and will not apply to countries such as China that export more than 10% of global Covid-19 vaccine supplies.
The proposed compromise is “misleading and ineffectual” and would prevent meaningful access to Covid-19 tests, vaccines and treatments, said Stiglitz, Indian economist Jayati Ghosh, and Oxfam Africa director Peter Kamalingin in an open letter distributed on Tuesday by the Health Justice Initiative (HJI), an SA advocacy group.
Shifted position
“[It] represents the EU’s belligerent blockade of any actual waiver of IP barriers and the US insistence that the IP waiver it supports be limited to vaccines,” they said.
More than 100 countries initially backed the original plan put forward by SA and India. The US has shifted its position to supporting a waiver solely for vaccines, a view shared by New Zealand and Australia.
Pharmaceutical companies that hold patents on Covid-19 vaccines and treatments have opposed the proposed waiver from the outset. On Tuesday Pfizer’s regional president for Africa and the Middle East Patrick van der Loo said the company’s position remains unchanged, and it does not support the compromise deal.
“The IP environment is what enabled Pfizer to develop a [Covid-19] vaccine. We invested billions of dollars not knowing whether this would be a success or not, and a solid IP infrastructure is what gives a company like Pfizer the confidence to make those investments,” he said in an interview with Business Day.
SA academics and researchers wrote to Ramaphosa last week, saying the leaked draft text is “defective both in its fundamentals and in its details”.
“Though it partially, but imperfectly, addresses some patent-related issues, it fails in all regards to address the problem of technology transfer. Overriding patents alone will not get SA or any other country expanded access to Covid-19 health products.
“Instead, as is already happening with the Technology Transfer Hub, vaccine developers are having to reinvent the wheel of product development and quality-assured manufacturing at a commercial scale,” wrote the researchers, led by University of Cape Town public health expert Leslie London.
Major vaccine producers, including Pfizer and Moderna, have refused to share their technology with the World Health Organisation-backed mRNA vaccine technology transfer hub in Cape Town, which recently announced it had made its own Covid-19 jab using publicly available information released by Moderna. If Moderna had provided more detailed know-how, it could have sped up the process, the hub’s researchers said at the time.
“In addition to failing to deliver vaccines, the draft text totally excludes medicines and diagnostics, both of which are widely available in rich countries but in scarce supply in the Global South. The consequences of patent protection on diagnostics were acutely experienced in SA with delayed testing due to the capture of diagnostic reagents by developed economies — resulting in the inability to access or manufacture our own,” the researchers said.
Update: March 22 2022
This article has been updated with additional information.
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