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JOHANNESBURG, Feb 25 (Reuters) - The African Union is
backing calls for drugmakers to waive some intellectual property
rights on COVID-19 medicines and vaccines to speed up their
rollout to poor countries, the head of its disease control body
said on Thursday.
South Africa and India, which both manufacture drugs and
vaccines, made the proposal at the World Trade Organization
(WTO) last year, arguing that intellectual property (IP) rules
were hindering the urgent scale-up of vaccine production and
provision of medical products to some patients.
They have faced opposition from some developed nations, but
the backing of the African Union (AU) may give renewed impetus
for the push to relax IP rules.
John Nkengasong, director of the Africa Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention, told a news conference that IP transfer
was a "win-win for everybody" that would address the huge
inequalities in global public health.
He gave two examples where the developing world had suffered
because of restricted access to medicines: the swine flu
pandemic in the late 2000s and HIV/AIDS in the 1990s.
"In 1996, HIV drugs were available, and we saw how mortality
in the developed world decreased drastically. But it would take
10 years before those drugs were accessible in Africa in any
meaningful way," he said.
"In between, 12 million Africans died, so I just use those
numbers to say: any IP transfer will be beneficial to everybody,
because nobody wants to sit back and be proud of that sad event
... We want to be on the right side of history."
Nkengasong added the Africa CDC's regulatory taskforce had
approved two versions of AstraZeneca's COVID-19 vaccine
for emergency use, a day after Ghana received its first
AstraZeneca doses from global vaccine distribution facility
COVAX.
He said the developers of Russia's Sputnik V vaccine had
submitted a "full dossier" of data to the Africa CDC and that in
the coming days an expert panel would review the data and make a
pronouncement.
"We have not received dossiers yet from China colleagues,
but we remain optimistic that they will submit to us," he
continued.
Several countries on the continent, including Egypt,
Zimbabwe and Senegal, have already started rolling out Chinese
COVID-19 shots.
(Reporting by Alexander Winning in Johannesburg and Omar
Mohammed in Nairobi
Editing by Joe Bavier and Mark Potter)
