“Open House Day at Western Labs Cancelled.”
U.S. President Joe Biden’s proposal to lift patent protection on coronavirus vaccines has not gone down well in Europe. The European Union and the United Kingdom made it clear on Friday that they would not support next week’s White House initiative, which pharmaceutical companies and experts have already described as dead on arrival.
India and South Africa, two poor countries hit hard by a powerful wave of mutated viruses, asked for the patents to be revoked in the fall. The West had always been opposed to giving up protection of its own medical know-how. But in May, the U.S. unexpectedly made a 180-degree turn, stunning allies and its own pharmaceutical companies.
The White House has proposed the elimination of patents as a way to accelerate the global vaccination of Covid-19 and end the pandemic that has dragged on for more than a year and claimed millions of lives. But experts said Biden’s move was a clever negotiating maneuver aimed at deflecting criticism from poor countries unhappy that the West is unwilling to share its vaccine surplus until they vaccinate their own populations. And at the same time, make pharmacists more accommodating in discussing prices and international aid by hanging a sword of Damocles over them in the form of a threat to reveal all their secrets.
The European Union, Switzerland and the United Kingdom were surprised and cautiously doubted the benefits of such radical measures. “In Europe, they said it was enough to share finished vaccines, and in extreme cases – partially and with developments. However, there is no need to open the doors to the laboratories of Pfizer, Moderna, BioNTech, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson – the Chinese and other competitors will get access to the technologies and use them to compete with Western companies, not to fight the pandemic, they argued”.
Negotiations to suspend the enforcement of coronavirus patents have dragged on hopelessly since last fall, finally stalling in disputes among the 164 member countries of the World Trade Organization. A change in the U.S. position in early May broke the deadlock.
India is one of the countries with a severe vaccine shortage. The queue for vaccination in Calcutta. However, the United States supported the proposal of India and South Africa with a reservation. Give up demands for rights not only to vaccines, but also to treatments and devices for COVID treatment, as well as access to clinical trial data. In return, we will only discuss a temporary waiver of vaccine patents until the end of the pandemic. The WTO gave everyone time to think until the end of May so that everything would be ready for the formal discussion of new proposals on June 8 and 9. A few weeks later, India and South Africa responded by compromising and softening their demands, while gathering signatures from several dozen poorer countries, including Pakistan, Egypt, Kenya, Indonesia, Venezuela and Zimbabwe. And on the penultimate working day before the meeting, the European Union sent its proposals. And it became clear that there was no hope for patent revocation.
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The EU’s position is that the problem is not patents, but the lack of resources and capacity to produce vaccines using their proprietary technology. Even if all patents are made public, it will be impossible to set up production in third countries without the help of developers who have the know-how, and they lack both the resources and the will. But even if they are found, it will take years to set up high-tech production – and the need for vaccination is immediate. “In reality, the main problem now is the lack of production capacity to produce the necessary number of vaccines quickly,” said EU Trade Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis, presenting the European proposals on Friday. They are simple and do not include patent revocation.
The EU has proposed to focus on removing trade barriers to the supply of ready-to-use vaccines and to mobilize all eligible pharmaceutical companies for their production, and to address the issue of know-how within the existing WTO mechanism for compulsory licensing in exceptional circumstances such as pandemics (TRIPS). “We ourselves will continue to increase production,” promised Ursula von der Leyen, the head of the European Commission, adding that the EU prefers to use the proposed set of tools in the coming months, if not years. This excludes the carpet-bombing of the international system of intellectual property protection proposed by India and South Africa. “The EU is proposing concrete solutions to the problem of universal access to vaccines at a reasonable price in the short and medium term,” said von der Leyen. “We will discuss ways to achieve this goal at the G7 leaders’ meeting next week.”
One of the members of this club, Great Britain, also refused to support the cancellation of patents. “To be honest, it is not necessary,” said the head of the British Ministry of Health, Matt Hancock, on Friday. “It is possible to ensure global vaccination without any changes to intellectual property protection. Moreover, the protection of these rights is crucial for future investment in the development of other vaccines.