(Adds WHO Africa director)
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 last
year, saying 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 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 IP transfers were
a "win-win for everybody" that would address huge inequalities
in global public health.
He gave two examples where the developing world had suffered
from 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."
Separately, the WHO's Africa director Matshidiso Moeti urged
pharmaceutical companies to be flexible with their IP to
facilitate access to medicines.
She expressed hope that discussions over waiving IP rights
would "turn into action at some point in the future".
Nkengasong added the Africa CDC's regulatory taskforce had
approved 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 data dossiers to the Africa CDC and an expert panel
would review it.
"We have not received dossiers yet from China colleagues,
but we remain optimistic," he added.
Egypt, Zimbabwe and Senegal have already started rolling out
Chinese COVID-19 shots.
(Reporting by Alexander Winning in Johannesburg and Omar
Mohammed and Ayenat Mersie in Nairobi; Editing by Joe Bavier,
Mark Potter and Hugh Lawson)
Astrazeneca (AZN)
