By Philip Blenkinsop
BRUSSELS, May 6 (Reuters) - President Joe Biden threw his
support behind waiving intellectual property rights for COVID-19
vaccines in a sharp U.S. reversal, but it could take months for
the World Trade Organization (WTO) to hammer out any
deal.
Before Biden's announcement on Wednesday, India and South
Africa confirmed their intention to draft a new waiver proposal
at a WTO General Council meeting, prompting the body's new
Director General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala to express hope for "a
pragmatic solution".
The two countries 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 must agree.
WHERE ARE THE TALKS NOW?
Ten WTO 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. They are pitted against richer developed
countries, such as Switzerland and members of the European
Union, where many pharmaceutical companies are based.
After the 10th round on April 30, India and South Africa
said they would revise their text from October in time for the
next TRIPS council meeting in the second half of May before
further discussion on June 8-9.
U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai said on Wednesday
she would pursue "text-based negotiations" on the WTO waiver,
the standard but tedious process for trade deal talks.
Negotiators trade texts with their preferred wording, then
try to find common ground, sometimes leaving blank spaces for
thorny differences to be settled by politicians.
Not only are the negotiations expected to be lengthy, they
are also likely to result in a waiver that is significantly
narrower in scope and shorter in duration than the one initially
proposed by India and South Africa, trade experts said.
All 164 WTO member countries must reach consent on such
decisions, with any one member able to veto them, so there could
be a lot of red pencils out. Negotiations are likely to be held
in a mixture of virtual and in-person meetings.
World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus
said on Monday 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 millions of African lives. In 2020, over half of
all people living with HIV were in South and East Africa,
according to UNAIDS.
The WHO head and 375 civil society and campaign groups such
as Doctors Without Borders back the proposal. Former leaders
from Britain's Gordon Brown to the former Soviet Union's Mikhail
Gorbachev had jointly written to Biden urging him to support it.
THE COUNTER VIEW
Big drug companies generally oppose waiving rights to their
intellectual property. The main Western producers are Moderna
, Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca and
jointly Pfizer and BioNTech. In October,
Moderna did though say it would not enforce its COVID-19 vaccine
patents during the pandemic.
Big Pharma says vaccine development is unpredictable and
costly and that strong intellectual property 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 safety, the companies 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 producers 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.
(Writing by Philip Blenkinsop and Nick Macfie;
Editing by Andrew Cawthorne)
Astrazeneca (AZN)
