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TWN Info
Service on WTO and Trade Issues (Apr21/15) Washington DC, 26 Apr (D. Ravi Kanth) – Big Pharma has apparently found a new bogey to block the temporary TRIPS waiver at the World Trade Organization in combating the worsening COVID-19 pandemic, amidst India being shaken by a double-mutated SARS-CoV-2 virus that is claiming around 2,500 lives and over 320,000 new cases a day. In their latest attempt to jettison an early decision by the Biden-Harris administration on the proposed TRIPS waiver that seeks to suspend certain provisions in the TRIPS Agreement relating to copyrights, industrial designs, patents, and protection of undisclosed information, the vaccine manufacturers in the US have stepped up their lobbying efforts on several spurious grounds, according to media reports. Their latest bogey is that the temporary TRIPS waiver for suspending IPRs (intellectual property rights) in combating the COVID-19 pandemic “would risk handing novel technology to China and Russia,” according to a news report in the Financial Times on 25 April. “As industry lobbying has escalated in Washington, companies have warned in private meetings with the US trade and White House Officials that giving up the intellectual property rights could allow China and Russia to exploit platforms such as mRNA, which could be used for other vaccines or even therapeutics for conditions such as cancer and heart problems in the future,” the FT reported. In an attempt to ensure their monopolistic grip on IPRs, which is being supported by the European Union, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and Norway among others, the leading vaccine manufacturing companies such as Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, and Novavax seemed to have made the issue of the TRIPS waiver a geopolitical one, amid the escalating political and military-related tensions between the US and its Western partners on the one hand, and China and Russia on the other. With IPRs continuing to remain a major barrier for sharing technology and know-how, and with the growing evidence that bilateral and voluntary licenses with their opaque contractual conditions are failing to address the grave supply-side problems arising from the pandemic, Big Pharma has now stoked the China-Russia bogey on somewhat spurious and “ideological” arguments. According to the FT report, “while Donald Trump’s administration firmly opposed the waiver at the WTO, along with the US, EU and Switzerland, US president Joe Biden’s top trade official Katherine Tai has rattled US pharmaceutical companies by appearing to put that position under review.” USTR’S EVOLVING POSITION A day before the WTO director-general Ms Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala convened a meeting on 14 April with four trade ministers (from the US, the European Union, India, and South Africa), pharmaceutical companies from the developed and developing countries, and other stakeholders to press ahead with her “third way” approach, the US Trade Representative (USTR) Ambassador Katherine Tai on 13 April discussed with representatives of the labour unions, advocacy groups, and pharmaceutical lobbies on what ought to be Washington’s stance on the proposed temporary TRIPS waiver. In her startling address at Ms Okonjo-Iweala’s meeting on “COVID-19: vaccine equity and what WTO can contribute” on 14 April, the USTR said that “humanity is facing a public health and economic crisis that we continue to struggle to manage and overcome,” suggesting that countries have “scrambled for limited supplies of masks, gloves, and therapies. We have pushed ourselves and each other to produce more and share more.” She acknowledged that “we are beset again by difficulty in production, supply, and equitable distribution,” suggesting that “the significant inequalities we are seeing in access to vaccines between developed and developing countries are completely unacceptable.” “Extraordinary times require extraordinary leadership, communication, and creativity,” she said, arguing that “extraordinary crises challenge all of us to break out of our comfortable moulds, our in-the-box thinking, our instinctive habits. This is not just a challenge for governments. This challenge applies equally to the industry responsible for developing and manufacturing the vaccines. There is still a gaping divide between developed and developing countries when it comes to access to medicines.” More poignantly, she said that “we hope to hear more today (at the WTO meeting) how the market has once again failed in meeting the health needs of developing countries,” arguing that “as part of that, we have to consider what modifications and reforms to our trade rules might be necessary to reflect what we have learned.” Ms Tai’s statement was praised by a developing country trade envoy as a “human-centered” approach. Apparently, her statement at the WTO meeting “has increased tension between pharma companies and the US trade representative (USTR), prompting one vaccine maker to complain to White House Officials about Tai’s remarks to the WTO,” the FT reported. The USTR apparently said that its top priority is to save lives and that it was “working with our global partners to explore pragmatic and effective steps to surge the production and equitable distribution of vaccines,” it is reported. At the informal meeting of the TRIPS Council on 22 April, a handful of developed countries led by the European Union, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom among others stuck to their continued obstructionist tactics by suggesting that the waiver will undermine the international patent system and innovation, in the face of evidence diametrically opposed to such “ideological” claims (see SUNS #9333 dated 26 April 2021). Even the US did not clearly lay out its evolving position at the TRIPS Council meeting other than suggesting that the WTO, the WHO (World Health Organization), and WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) need to work together on the vaccine equity issue. US LAWMAKERS, CSOs & 2 MILLION SIGNATORIES WANT DECISION ON WAIVER In a major press conference in Washington DC on 23 April, US lawmakers including Senators Bernie Sanders and Tammy Baldwin, Representatives Earl Blumenauer, Chuy Garcia and Jan Schakowsky, as well as leaders of labour, public health, faith and other civil society organizations (CSOs) delivered two million petitions to urge US President Joseph Biden to join 100 other nations in “supporting a temporary waiver of World Trade Organization (WTO) rules that now give a few corporations monopoly control over where and how much COVID-19 vaccines and treatments are made.” Ahead of the WTO’s General Council meeting on 5 May to consider the waiver, the lawmakers and advocates urged the White House to support an emergency COVID-19 waiver of WTO intellectual property rules, so that greater supplies of vaccines, treatments, and diagnostic tests can be produced in as many places as possible, as quickly as possible. The pandemic cannot be stopped anywhere unless vaccines, tests, and treatments are available everywhere, so that variants that evade current vaccines do not develop, the speakers said. “This, in my view, is not a complicated issue,” said Senator Sanders, arguing that “common sense and morality dictate that we must do everything humanly possible to crush this global pandemic and save millions of people who are in danger of needlessly dying.” “It’s one thing when somebody dies and there’s nothing you can do about it. But it’s another thing entirely when you have a tool at your disposal that can save a human life and you do nothing about that. … We have the tools to save human lives, and those tools should be readily available to all people,” Senator Sanders argued. “Poor people in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and throughout the world have as much a right to be protected from the virus, to live, as people in wealthier nations,” Senator Sanders said, adding that “to me, this is not a huge debate, this is common human morality.” “That is why I and everybody else in this discussion have been urging the Biden administration to support the proposal to waive vaccine-related intellectual property rights at the WTO in order to expand supplies of vaccines,” he argued. “Ending this pandemic,” said Senator Sanders, “requires collaboration, solidarity, and empathy. It requires a different mindset, that’s the issue here, a different mindset. It’s the mindset that tells the pharmaceutical industry that saving perhaps millions of lives is more important than protecting their already excessive profits. The US government, our taxpayers, have invested enormous sums of money into the production of these technologies. As a result, all people in America and around the world should benefit from that investment, and it should not just go to a handful of very profitable drug companies from wealthy countries.” Surprisingly, the Biden-Harris administration has not reversed the Trump administration’s stand to block the waiver along with a handful of developed countries. INSUBSTANTIAL SUPPORT TO INDIA In the face of the public health system in India being subjected to multi-pronged crises and worsening COVID-19 crisis, the United States and other western countries have pledged to provide seemingly insubstantial assistance in the form of oxygen cylinders, diagnostic equipment, therapeutics, and raw materials to Indian vaccine manufacturing companies that were earlier denied to them, but not the COVID-19 vaccines that have been hoarded by Washington and other developed countries. In an alarming life-and-death situation facing 1.3 billion people in India, with new cases climbing to unprecedented levels of around 325,000 as well as 2,500 deaths per day, the US and other western nations are now coming to the rescue of the beleaguered nation. So far, more than 190,000 people are reported to have died from the second deadly wave of a double-mutated SARS-CoV-2 virus that is ravaging the country. The current explosion of the COVID-19 infections has crossed the 19 million mark. “Just as India sent assistance to the United States as our hospitals were strained early in the pandemic, the United States is determined to help India in its time of need,” the White House said in a statement on 25 April. The Biden administration has come under criticism about its unwillingness to send millions of doses from its stockpile of the AstraZeneca vaccine, which has yet to be approved in the US, to help the Indian government, which has struggled to vaccinate its population. Despite the grave shortage of critical raw materials being faced by India’s two largest vaccine manufacturing companies due to the Biden administration’s ban on the export of raw materials, it is not clear when and whether the ban will be lifted.
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