EDITORIAL: US IP waiver backing is welcome but small step to end vaccine apartheid

In an unexpected but most welcome U-turn, the US last week joined SA and India in calling for the waiver on typical intellectual property rules for Covid-19 shots, treatments and other measures until the world reaches herd immunity.  

SA and India have been championing the case to suspend protections covering industrial design, patents, trade secrets and copyrights since October 2020, rightly framing the campaign as an opportunity for the world to push back against nationalism and embrace global solidarity.  

Having the US in their corner is a big step towards the noble goal of an expanded vaccine distribution, especially in developing countries such as India, Brazil, Turkey and Argentina where new virus infections are surging.   

“This is a global health crisis, and the extraordinary circumstances of the Covid-19 pandemic call for extraordinary measures,” said Katherine Tai, the US trade representative. 

Indeed, without drastic measures to enable widespread manufacturing of vaccines, developing countries, many of which are on our continent, will not meaningfully participate in the global economic recovery, and millions tossed into extreme poverty will stay there longer.

The International Monetary Fund expects Sub-Saharan Africa to be the slowest growing region in 2021 as most struggle to get their hands on the scarce vaccines, forcing them to impose growth-sapping lockdowns and keeping them walled off from big-spending international tourists.  

It is morally outrageous for richer countries, representing just 16% of the world’s population, to have a large pool of vaccine doses while low-income ones have little or no access to  jabs. Of the more than 1.2-billion vaccine doses administered globally to date, richer countries have received about 90% and developing countries just under 1% — meaning one in four citizens in the West has had a jab while just one in 500 in poorer countries have done so.  

The result of this shocking vaccine apartheid are unprecedented grim scenes of patients dying on hospital beds, in ambulances and car parks, gasping for air in India, which now accounts for more than half the world’s daily infection rates and deaths.  

For SA, as well as other developing countries, we face an increased risk of new waves of infections, leading to lockdowns and further depressing an economy that in 2020 slumped to its biggest annual GDP drop in a century.  

That said, it would be naive to say the US backing is the game changer it is touted to be even as high-profile individuals such as Pope Francis and other rich countries such as France and New Zealand throw their weight behind the plan.  

German chancellor Angela Merkel has swiftly rejected it, casting doubt that the idea would garner enough international support to become a reality. World Trade Organization (WTO) agreements require all 160-plus members to be on the same page.    

So, this idea is dead in the water. It also underscores the need to urgently remodel the global trade watchdog’s antiquated rule book to make it relevant for the modern economy.   

The WTO, which was embraced by dozens of developing countries when it was born in 1995, because of the potential to challenge stronger countries such as the US in front of impartial judges, has been sinking for much of the past decade. It has failed to complete the last round of negotiations under the Doha Development Agenda, initiated in 2001. Perhaps the most striking example of how the WTO has broken down is the fact that two of its biggest members, the US and China, engaged in a trade war, violating the body’s rules with tit-for-tat tariffs.   

It’s hard to imagine countries such as Switzerland and the UK, home to some of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies,  agreeing with many in developing countries that vaccines are global public goods, especially during the pandemic.  

While it’s difficult to dispute the assertion that patent protections were behind the development of the vaccine at a record pace, and that taking that away could potentially stifle innovation, it is clear that manufacturing the vaccine needs to be scaled up. 

As we have written before,  the underlying goal of the patent waiving proposal is to expand vaccine distribution, and that can be achieved if Big Pharma can be convinced to license manufacturing to other countries while also keeping intellectual property protections in place.