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TWN Info
Service on Health Issues (Mar21/07) Geneva, 15 Mar (D. Ravi Kanth) – Without naming the United States, the European Union, and the United Kingdom, the WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has criticized “some countries” that are “putting lives at risk around the world” in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic which has so far claimed more than 2.6 million lives globally. The three countries along with Norway, Japan, and Switzerland as well as Big Pharma have continued to block an early outcome on the TRIPS waiver proposal co-sponsored by South Africa and India along with 55 other countries at the World Trade Organization, according to people familiar with the development. In addition to blocking by these six countries of the TRIPS waiver proposal, which has been endorsed by the WHO DG as one of the main approaches to combat COVID-19, they have now escalated their export restrictions on the vital supplies of raw materials even to those vaccine manufacturers that they had contracted with, according to media reports. “Well, the real issue here,” according to Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, who was interviewed by New York-based Democracy Now on 12 March, is that the global shortage of Covid vaccines is “an artificial shortage, that if you had a waiver of intellectual property rights, something that is being discussed right now with the WTO, but, unfortunately, the advanced countries, including the United States, have not come out strongly for that waiver, there are – you know, just like President Biden pointed out that you could have Merck help produce a vaccine (from (Johnson & Johnson) that was discovered, developed by another company, because it had excess capacity, there are many companies in developing countries that could produce massive amounts of vaccine if they had the right, the intellectual property, if they get access to the technology.” “So, that’s why it’s so important for us to have the suspension of intellectual property rights relative to – related to COVID-19,” Prof Stiglitz said. “It’s just foolish that we aren’t doing it,” he argued. “And it’s particularly unconscionable, given that the advanced countries’ governments have actually financed a very large fraction of that research, and the companies themselves are already making multiple returns on their investments,” Prof Stiglitz said. In a report issued by the Institute for New Economic Thinking on 11 March on “The Pandemic and the Economic Crisis: A Global Agenda for Urgent Action”, Prof. Stiglitz said “insufficient production is an important reason for the poor and unequal distribution, since it has created scarcity.” “The major factor limiting supply of the approved vaccines is the persistence of patent rights that give pharmaceutical companies a monopoly on production, thereby confining supplies to their own capacities and the few production licenses they choose to issue to others,” the report argued. WHO DG EXPRESSES GRAVE CONCERN ON EXPORT RESTRICTIONS After suggesting that the WHO’s Global Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety has reviewed signals about the growing blood clots arising from the AstraZeneca vaccine, Dr Tedros said that “more than 335 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered globally so far.” Yet, for somewhat inexplicable reasons, he did not provide a break-up of the vaccines being administered. The US, the UK, the EU, Canada, Japan, Australia, and Israel excluding the Palestinian region, have had the highest share of vaccines that are being administered, according to media reports. The DG highlighted that “the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator (ACT-A), which includes COVAX, was launched almost a year ago as the international vehicle for the equitable distribution of vaccines, diagnostics and therapeutics.” Dr Tedros suggested that “the emergence of new viral variants, the limited supply of vaccines, the lag in uptake of new diagnostics and oxygen, and the lack of funding to support the distribution of these life-saving tools are a major challenge for the global control of the pandemic.” He said that US$11 billion have been committed to the ACT Accelerator, “but we still face a funding gap of 22.1 billion dollars.” He suggested that the funds provided for ACT-A and COVAX are insignificant as compared to more than US$13 trillion spent by high-income countries on fiscal stimulus to date as per the IMF estimate. He urged “countries to fully finance the ACT Accelerator as the best investment in the global recovery.” Meanwhile, on 12 March, a new alliance comprised of the US, Japan, India, and Australia, or the so-called new Quad, ostensibly to contain China’s influence in the Pacific region, has committed to provide $200 million to India to manufacture 1 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines by the end of the year 2022. Yet, two major vaccine manufacturers in India – the Serum Institute of India which is producing the AstraZeneca vaccine and Biological E Ltd – have warned “that the world’s vaccine production is being threatened by America’s pandemic export controls”, according to a news report in the Financial Times on 15 March (see more below). On the WHO DG’s remarks on 12 March, Dr Tedros indicated that “WHO gave emergency use listing to Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine, making it the fourth vaccine to receive WHO’s approval.” He said that it is “the green light for a vaccine to be procured and rolled out by COVAX.” He said that “the COVAX Facility has booked 500 million doses of the J&J vaccine, and we look forward to receiving them as soon as possible.” On the figures about the distribution of vaccines, he said that “globally, 335 million doses of vaccine have been administered in 144 economies” and “76% of those are in 10 countries.” However, the DG remained silent over the ten countries that have hogged 76% of supplies around the world. Without using his common refrain of “Me-First” policies for vaccine distribution, the DG said “the inequitable distribution of vaccines remains the biggest threat to ending the pandemic and driving a global recovery.” Referring to the WHO and its COVAX partners’ meeting on 8-9 March, he said “manufacturing any vaccine requires a lot of supplies, including glass vials and plastic filters, and the raw materials needed to make them.” “The sudden increase in demand for vaccine production has led to a shortage of these and other supplies, which is limiting the production of vaccines for COVID-19 and could put the supply of routine childhood vaccines at risk,” he noted. Without “naming and shaming” the US, the EU, and the UK among others, the DG merely said that “some countries have imposed legal restrictions on the export of critical supplies. This is putting lives at risk around the world.” He called on “all countries not to stockpile supplies that are needed urgently to ramp up production of vaccines,” suggesting that “in a global pandemic, no country can go it alone. We are all inter-dependent.” Without naming the US which is administering 2.3 million doses daily, the WHO chief said “no country can simply vaccinate its way out of this pandemic – we cannot end the pandemic anywhere unless we end it everywhere.” He cautioned that “the longer the virus circulates, the higher the chances that variants will emerge that make vaccines less effective.” According to Dr Tedros, “variants don’t make physical distancing less effective. They don’t make hand hygiene, masks, ventilation and other public health measures less effective.” REALITIES ON THE GROUND The realities on the ground are that the manufacturing of vaccines are going to be dramatically slowed down due to a range of problems, according to media reports. The leaders of the US, Japan, India and Australia on 12 March pledged more than $200 million to help Indian companies “expand their capacities faster and add one billion doses to the global supply” by the end of 2022. Instead of resolving problems through global cooperation to fight a global problem, the four countries are tapping India’s vaccine production capabilities; the new alliance is trying to counter Chinese expansionism, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) on 14 March. “China and Russia have been supplying vaccines produced domestically to most of the developing world, while the US has so far focused much of its efforts on ensuring supplies for Americans,” the WSJ commented. On the Quad initiative for vaccine manufacturing in India, the Indian foreign secretary Mr Harsh Vardhan Shringla said that “we are talking about huge investments in creating additional vaccine capacities in India, for export to countries in the Indo-Pacific region for their betterment.” “We are talking about immunizing people in an entire region,” Mr Shringla said. DIFFICULTIES FACED BY INDIAN VACCINE PRODUCERS Two major vaccine manufacturing companies from India – Biological E Ltd which has contracted with Johnson & Johnson to produce its one-shot vaccine, and the Serum Institute of India to produce the AstraZeneca vaccine – said they may not be able to fulfill global orders because of Washington’s use of the Defense Production Act (DPA), according to a report in the Financial Times on 15 March. Under the Defense Production Act used as wartime powers to solve major production-related problems, the Biden Administration has identified critical supply shortages of 12 items (coronavirus tests, N95 masks, isolation gowns, nitrile gloves and vaccine syringes among others) needed to help combat the coronavirus pandemic. Incidentally, the Biden Administration is following the Trump administration that has invoked the DPA during the pandemic to secure priority supply of critical materials in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. The DPA powers, according to Ms Mahima Datla, the CEO of Biological E Ltd, “it’s not only going to make the scale-up for COVID vaccines difficult, but because of this, it’s going to make manufacturing of routine vaccines extremely difficult.” With “vaccine nationalism” becoming rampant and causing massive global disruptions in the access to COVID-19 vaccines, “the supply chain challenges are going to make scaling up extremely difficult.” The US Defense Production Act “could undermine the global vaccination effort,” according to Mr Adar Poonawalla, the CEO of the Serum Institute of India, which is manufacturing the AstraZeneca vaccine. “We are talking about having free global access to vaccines but if we can’t get the raw materials out of the US – that’s going to be a serious limiting factor,” he told the FT. In short, after suffering maximum loss of lives and an increasing number of new cases, the US appears committed to vaccinating its own people first by “hook or crook” while starving the poor countries of COVID-19 vaccines. It is little wonder that the US and its Big Pharma are now blocking the TRIPS waiver along with its Northern partners. The TRIPS waiver would have unleashed a sustained global effort for ramping up the production of vaccines across the world but it looks like “Uncle Sam” may not allow that to happen, said a TRIPS negotiator, who asked not to be quoted.
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