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By Philip Blenkinsop
BRUSSELS, May 5 (Reuters) - World Trade Organization members
will assess on Wednesday signs of progress in talks on a
proposal by South Africa and India to waive patent rights on
COVID-19 vaccines in order to boost supply to developing
countries.
They want to ease rules of the WTO's Trade-Related Aspects
of Intellectual Property (TRIPS) agreement. WTO decisions are
based on consensus, so all 164 members need to agree.
Ten meetings in seven months have failed to produce a
breakthrough, with 60 proposal sponsors from emerging economies,
backed by a chorus of campaign groups, Nobel laureates and
former world leaders, pitted against richer developed countries,
such as Switzerland, the United States and in the European
Union, where many pharmaceutical companies are based.
WHERE ARE THE TALKS NOW?
After a 10th round of talks on April 30, the waiver
proposal's backers said they would revise their text from
October in time for the next TRIPS council meeting in the second
half of May before a further discussion on June 8-9.
The new text could be more limited than the current
proposal.
Norway's ambassador Dagfinn Sorli, the council chair who
will brief Wednesday's WTO General Council, expressed "careful
optimism".
World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus
talked on Monday of "encouraging progress", but said the process
needed to be completed as soon as possible. The WHO said in
April that of 700 million vaccines globally administered, only
0.2% had been in low-income countries.
THE PROPONENTS ARGUMENT
The Indian/South African proposal in October says property
rights such as patents, industrial designs, copyright and
protection of undisclosed information hinder timely access to
affordable vaccines and medicines essential to combat COVID-19.
They say the waiver should last for an unspecified time
period, with an annual review until it terminates, and call for
unhindered global sharing of technology and know-how.
They say there cannot be a repeat of the early years of the
HIV/AIDS pandemic, when a lack of access to life-saving
medicines cost at least 11 million African lives.
The WHO head and 375 civil society and campaign groups such
as Doctors Without Borders back the proposal and former leaders
from Britain's Gordon Brown to Mikhail Gorbachev of the Soviet
Union have jointly written to U.S. President Joe Biden urging
him to support it.
THE COUNTER VIEW
Big drug companies oppose patent waivers, as do Britain,
Switzerland and the United States. The main Western producers
are Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca
and jointly Pfizer and BioNTech.
They say vaccine development is unpredictable and costly and
that strong IP protection helped provide the incentive for the
development of vaccines in record time and will do so again in
work on tackling new variants or in a future pandemic.
Proponents counter that some of the money was public funds.
Big Pharma also says vaccine-making is difficult - witness
the production problems non-specialist AstraZeneca has faced -
so suspending patents alone will not bring more shots.
Complex vaccines require deep cooperation between developers
and manufacturers. Any failure to make them properly could
undermine public confidence in vaccine safety, they say.
They also point to over 260 partnership agreements already
in place for production and distribution and comment that, under
the existing TRIPS agreement, governments can allow produces to
make a patented product without the consent of the patent owner.
Developing countries have such "compulsory licences" to push
down prices for HIV/AIDS medication from 2002 to 2007.
The situation though is fluid. In Brazil, the only
developing country to oppose the waiver, the Senate has passed a
bill to suspend COVID-19 vaccine patents. It has become quieter
at the WTO since April.
The White House said last week it was considering options to
maximise global supply of vaccines, including backing the
waiver.
THIRD WAY
WTO director-general Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala has suggested a
"third way" as a compromise, laying out global action to
increase vaccine access after a meeting with producers,
governments and others.
She urged vaccine makers to increase technology transfer to
bring in new manufacturing capacity and to be transparent on
contracts and pricing.
U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai told the same
meeting that extraordinary times required courage and sacrifice
from governments and leaders - but also from industry. On
Tuesday, she said economic recovery depended on addressing
global vaccine inequity.
(Reporting by Philip Blenkinsop; Editing by Angus MacSwan)
