TWN Info Service on Health Issues (May22/10)
25 May 2022
Third World Network

Charting the course of the WTO’s 12th Ministerial Conference

FPV Bulletin #1
May2022

In the lead-up to the 12th WTO Ministerial Conference, the Feminists for a People’s Vaccine campaign, to emphasize the urgency of current TRIPS Waiver proceedings developments, will be producing short bulletin updates. We MUST demand a full waiver and nothing less!

The TRIPS Waiver proposal at the WTO, for a temporary waiver of IP barriers to Diagnostics, Therapeutics and Vaccines (DVTs) for SARS-CoV2, submitted by India and South Africa in October 2020, co-sponsored by another 63 countries and supported by several others, is premised on fairness and equity and calls for global solidarity to combat the pandemic. The proposal envisions timely and affordable access to DVTs for all, regardless of geographic location or economic capability. However, eighteen months down the line, greedy pharmaceutical companies have minted billions of dollars’ worth of profits and the Global North, especially the EU has left no stone unturned to water down the 65 countries’ co-sponsored TRIPS Waiver proposal. Further, a leaked document crafted by the WTO Secretariat (March 15th 2022), endorsed by the EU, adds onerous barriers and compliance conditions and essentially guts out the original proposal.

In a desperate bid to arrive at a consensus, the WTO Director-General (DG), Ms. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, has introduced an “outcome document” on May 3rd, 2022, and currently, the TRIPS Council chair, Ambassador Lansana Gberie of Sierra Leone is presiding over text-based negotiations of this document with 30 countries. There are urgent calls to WTO Members by the DG, emphasizing the need to find consensus on the outcome document and “prove” that the 12th Ministerial Conference (MC12) is “not going to be a failure”. The consensus is being sought on a text essentially based on the EU’s position that neither the US nor India and South Africa have endorsed. Ironically, recognizing this, the EU’s Trade Commissioner and Executive Vice President, V. Dombrovskis referred to the “orphan status” of the so-called “Quad” text.

Yet, the DG and TRIPS Council Chair are ramming through the document to reach a consensus. The DG has urged delegates to be prepared to compromise saying, “the perfect is the enemy of the good”.

South Africa has emphasized the need for any outcome to cover the production of all “COVID-19 products including diagnostics and therapeutics…especially in Africa”. It openly criticized the outcome document, saying it “falls short” of what was originally proposed.

The Feminists for a People’s Vaccine Campaign has raised the key problems on the unacceptably limited scope, barriers and conditionalities of the proposed text in a statement released on March 16th, 2022. Among them are: • The document is limited to patents on vaccines only, leaving out therapeutics and diagnostics where there also huge and devastating access inequalities. • Governments wishing to use compulsory licenses are obliged to include a list of patents. This becomes problematic as pending patent applications are not accounted for, and can act as deterrents for developing country manufacturers looking to enter the market. • The restrictive eligibility criteria knock out potential producers, including some LDCs if those countries export more than 10% of their vaccines production from these measures! • The additional conditions go beyond what is in the TRIPS Agreement and can be a dangerous precedent for future use of policy space and the freedom for generic manufacturers to operate.

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