Speaking the language of equitable vaccine access, yet all the while protecting pharma profits

In October 2020, India and South Africa asked the World Trade Organization (WTO) to allow countries to waive patents and other intellectual property (IP) rights related to COVID-19 medicines, vaccines, diagnostics and other technologies for the duration of the pandemic.

The goal is to facilitate the transfer of technology and scientific knowledge to developing countries so they can ramp up the global production of vaccines and other essential health technologies.

Almost five months on, consideration of the waiver rumbles on. More than 80 countries support the proposal, including Argentina, Bangladesh, the DR Congo, Egypt, Indonesia, Kenya, Nigeria, Pakistan and Venezuela. They argue it would facilitate timely access to affordable medical products for all countries in need. Echoing their defensive positions around HIV medicines two decades ago, nations with established pharmaceutical industries – and the most to profit to make from the COVID commodities ‘market’ – are raising fierce objections.

But there is one critical difference this time around: prominent African leaders of key international organizations are voicing their support:

The new WTO Director-General – Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, a Nigerian economist and former government minister – said: “I propose that we ‘walk and chew gum’ by also focusing on the immediate needs of dozens of poor countries that have yet to vaccinate a single person. People are dying in poor countries.”

Endorsing the waiver, World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus – a former Ethiopian Minister of Health and of Foreign Affairs, biologist and public health researcher – called on WTO member states to lift IP protections on COVID-19 vaccines, adding: “If not now, when?”

And Winnie Byanyima – Ugandan politician and diplomat, Executive Director of UNAIDS and former head of Oxfam International – commented, “What we see today is a stampede, a survival of the fittest approach, where those with the deepest pockets, with the sharpest elbows are grabbing what is there and leaving others to die.”

At a time when many political leaders speak the language of equitable access, while crossing fingers behind backs to protect the profits of their pharmaceutical industries, the fate of the IP waiver proposal is one of the most explicit moral litmus tests the creaking international order has faced.

As Dr Tedros rightly warned earlier this year, “The world is on the brink of a catastrophic moral failure – and the price of this failure will be paid with lives and livelihoods in the world’s poorest countries.”