Pressure mounts on UK to back WTO Covid-19 vaccine patent waiver
More and more people are urging the government to support a proposal made by India and South Africa to curb pandemic
How many UK citizens realise that the government is blocking a proposal at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) intended to make it quicker and easier for people in other countries to be vaccinated or treated for Covid-19? Why isn’t this all over TV screens or the front pages of the national newspapers? Whether or not Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he would prefer to see “bodies pile high” rather than have a third lockdown, the bodies really could be piling even higher abroad if the government doesn’t dramatically u-turn.
The proposal was made last October by the Indian and South African governments to the WTO’s Council for Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). It requested that the Council recommend to the WTO’s General Council a temporary “waiver” of several sections of the legally-binding 1994-5 TRIPS Agreement about patents, industrial designs, protection of undisclosed information and copyright and related rights, on the grounds that this would help meet a “growing supply-demand gap” for “new diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines for COVID-19.”
“The rapid scaling up of manufacturing globally is an obvious crucial solution to address the timely availability and affordability of medical products to all countries in need,” the Indians and South Africans wrote. “There are several reports about intellectual property rights hindering or potentially hindering timely provisioning of affordable medical products to the patients.”
In other words: suspend patents and certain other restrictions, stop “vaccine nationalism” or “vaccine apartheid”, and save lives.
However, the UK government, along with the EU and various others, has been vigorously blocking that proposal. An initial statement to the TRIPS Council late last year ran: “we have not identified clear ways in which IP [intellectual property] has acted as a barrier to accessing vaccines, treatments, or technologies in the global response to COVID-19. A waiver to the IP rights set out in the TRIPS Agreement is an extreme measure to address an unproven problem. The UK is of the view that pursuing the proposed path would be counterproductive and would undermine a regime that offers solutions to the issues at hand.”
Another UK statement to the TRIPS Council last month continuing to defend its position cited its contributions to the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) COVAX initiative and the UK-headquartered company AstraZeneca licensing “over a dozen large-scale manufacturers, including partnerships to produce up to 1.2bn doses specifically for low- and middle-income countries.” The government would be prepared to “move forward with evidence-based discussion”, ran that statement, once various apparently outstanding questions had been answered.
In the TRIPS Council’s latest informal meeting, held last week on 22 April, the South Africans said their attempts to make progress had “fallen on deaf ears since delegations opposing the waiver continue to ask for evidence. . . While we have circular discussions in this forum, the virus is running rampant, evading vaccines, with a strong likelihood that the lack of vaccines in many parts of the world will come back to bite hard, with many more lockdowns and illnesses.”
In a second statement made that day the South Africans singled out the UK for asking what they described as a “barrage of questions”, before claiming that many of them had already been answered.
Mustaqeem De Gama, representing the South Africans at the WTO, tells me that the UK’s argument for opposing the waiver is that intellectual property rights don’t constitute a “barrier” and that the TRIPS Agreement already permits certain “flexibilities” to address emergencies.
“They doubt that the waiver can be implemented in a way that could give rise to an expedited solution regarding manufacturing capacity,” De Gama says. “This position has been debunked. In addition, the UK raised various questions with the intention to delay text-based discussion on the language of the waiver.”
How do members of civil society working on such a desperately critical issue feel about the UK’s position, especially given the horrors and hell currently engulfing India and the fact that worldwide Covid-19 cases are continuing to rise? Mohga Kamal-Yanni, a doctor supporting the Peoples’ Vaccine Alliance, a coalition of dozens of organisations from around the world, including Oxfam, describes it as “just awful” and “so, so bad” - and even worse than the US’s.
“They’re actually positively opposing the waiver,” she tells me. “At least we’re hearing from the US some positive hints, some signs.”
For Nick Dearden, from the London-based non-governmental organisation (NGO) Global Justice Now, the UK’s position is “hostile” and “very, very out-of-step with public opinion.”
“They’re absolutely at the forefront of not wanting the waiver,” he tells me. “They’re hardcore. I hope they’re going to be left behind.”
Dearden also describes the UK’s position as “deeply hypocritical.” “The government has completely failed to properly use the fair distribution methods that have been set up - it’s just bypassed them, bought as many vaccines as it possibly can - and yet is now saying to the rest of the world: “the system works just fine,” he says. “It works fine for Britain, but clearly doesn’t work fine for others. In fact, just hearing the news now, it seems Britain has said to India it has no surplus vaccines at the moment because it wants to immunise 30 to 40 year olds, but at exactly the same time it says the production systems for vaccines are completely ok and we don’t need to change it in the way that India and South Africa are proposing. It’s staggering, staggering hypocrisy.”
Sangeeta Shashikant, a lawyer from the Malaysia-based NGO Third World Network (TWN), calls the UK’s position “outrageous”, “self-defeating” and “totally inappropriate.” Although she describes it as effectively “business-as-usual”, she says that it is still “surprising in a global pandemic to have taken this strategy.” According to a TWN article last week to which she contributed, the UK, along with the EU and Switzerland, has been using “diversionary tactics” at TRIPS Council meetings and “reiterated that undermining or upending intellectual property rights is a “no-go”.”
“They’re obstructing any sort of movement to text-based negotiation [at the TRIPS Council],” Shashikant tells me. “I would say they are just creating barriers to access. The UK is saying the current system is working, but it’s not. There is huge inequity [in vaccines and other treatments] and the inequity has become more acute. The UK is prolonging the pandemic. That is not good, even for the UK.”
For Roz Scourse, from Medecins sans Frontieres's (MSF) London office, the UK’s position is “really shameful” and “extremely hypocritical.” She says it is “not really a surprise”, but at the same time many people working in her field are “shocked” that “even in a time of global pandemic these governments have chosen not to reconsider putting profits ahead of lives.”
MSF-UK is encouraging members of the public to write to their MPs to urge the government to support the waiver, partly on the grounds that so many vaccines and other medical tools have received billions of pounds of public funding and therefore “should be considered a global public good, not the property of pharmaceutical companies.”
“The UK has obviously done very well with the vaccination roll-out, but what the IP waiver is arguing for is that we don’t want to have a situation where it’s one person in the UK or someone in India getting the vaccine,” Scourse tells me. “It’s about vaccines for all. It’s about maximising the size of the pie. It’s not about taking vaccines away from the UK. It’s about making sure everyone has them.”
Global awareness of the proposed waiver at the WTO and calls for its adoption are now growing rapidly, with a sudden snowballing in recent weeks and days - although Bill Gates remains unconvinced. Just consider the extraordinary range of some of the people from around the world who have publicly expressed support for it:
1 The 100 governments at the WTO, according to MSF, now backing the Indians’ and South Africans’ initial proposal. “The waiver should continue until widespread vaccination is in place globally,” they argued, “and the majority of the world's population has developed immunity.”
2 The more than 375 civil society organisations which quickly urged the WTO to support that proposal. “In this pandemic, the pharmaceutical industry has mainly pursued “business as usual” approaches, entrenching monopolistic intellectual property (IP) controls over COVID-19 health technologies that restrict scale-up of manufacturing, lock out diversified suppliers, and undermine competition that results in lower prices,” those organisations wrote. “A few companies, such as Astra Zeneca, have pledged not for profit prices during the pandemic, and yet by maintaining control over these technologies, can unilaterally declare the end of the pandemic and increase prices to maximise profits, even if it undermines international efforts to save lives.”
3 The United Nations’ AIDS agency, UNAIDS, which has warned that catastrophic past mistakes could be made again. “We cannot repeat the painful lessons from the early years of the AIDS response, when people in wealthier countries got back to health, while millions of people in developing countries were left behind,” executive director Winnie Byanyima has said. “If we continue with business as usual we will fail in delivering fair access to COVID-19 treatments for all those in need.”
4 The 95 UK MPs, Lords and Baronesses who last November wrote to UK Secretary of State for International Trade Liz Truss and the then Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Alok Sharma saying they were “deeply concerned” about the government’s position on the waiver. “The aim is to prevent intellectual property barriers from restricting access to COVID-19 medicines, tools, devices and vaccines to ensure all health systems are equipped with the health technologies they need to end this pandemic,” they wrote. That letter went out under Liberal Democrat MP Layla Moran’s name. “The decision to block the waiver may impede our ability to ensure vaccine equity around the world in the medium and long term and I implore [the government] to reconsider their policy,” Moran tells me.
5 The 45 UK-based business leaders, academics, economists and trade unions who wrote to Prime Minister Johnson in mid-March saying that “the world is facing a catastrophe around vaccine access” and urging the UK to back the waiver.
6 The more than 170 former heads of state and government and Nobel laureates who, earlier this month, wrote to US President Joe Biden describing the waiver as “vital and necessary” to end the pandemic. Signatories included former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown and ex-President of France François Hollande. They said they were “gravely concerned by the very slow progress in scaling up global COVID-19 vaccine access and inoculation in low- and middle-income countries”, and that a waiver “would expand global manufacturing capacity, unhindered by industry monopolies that are driving the dire supply shortages blocking vaccine access. 9 in 10 people in most poor countries may well go without a vaccine this year. At this pace, many nations will be left waiting until at least 2024 to achieve mass COVID-19 immunization, despite what the limited, while welcome, COVAX initiative is able to offer.” 10 US senators including Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have since urged Biden to back the waiver, two million people have reportedly signed a petition asking him to do the same, and the President is now reportedly mulling it over.
7 The 250 civil society organisations who, mid this month, wrote to the new WTO director-general, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, saying that the WTO should agree to the waiver. “Global supply should not be dependent on the purely commercial prerogatives and exclusive rights of pharmaceutical companies holding the technology. There is simply too much at stake,” those organisations wrote. The following day, Okonjo-Iweala appeared to support the idea when she said that, going forward, she expected WTO members to “advance negotiations in the TRIPS Council on the waiver proposal and incentives for research and innovation. I hope that the ideas and the open dialogue heard will move us closer to agreement.”
8 The celebrities who have leant their names to an Avaaz petition addressed to all world leaders, the WTO and pharmaceutical companies calling for a “people’s vaccine” and urging them to suspend patents, among other things. Those celebrities included George Clooney, Sharon Stone, Lily Cole and Annie Lennox, and that petition has now been signed by more than 1.2m people.
9 The “Independent SAGE” scientist Gabriel Scally who wrote an article in The Guardian on 18 April titled, “The world needs a patent waiver on Covid vaccines. Why is the UK blocking it?” “By helping block a patent waiver,” Scally wrote, “the UK government is stifling vaccine production, which means many countries will wait years for sufficient doses. That risks letting the virus run rampant, leading to new variants and putting our own vaccination programme in jeopardy. It would be a reckless act of self-mutilation. The British government should urgently review its opposition.”
10 The WHO’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who wrote in the New York Times last week that to date “the amount of vaccines delivered [globally] has been totally insufficient” and highlighted the WTO waiver as one of three solutions. This “would level the playing field and give countries more leverage in their discussions with companies. Governments could drive greater sharing of intellectual property by offering incentives to companies to do it,” he wrote.
11 The 23 UK MPs, one Baroness and seven civil society organisations which, on Monday this week, described the UK as “one of the loudest voices of the World Trade Organisation opposing calls for the monopolies on Covid medicines and vaccines to be broken”, and requested that the Prime Minister, government ministers and civil servants publish all their private communications with pharmaceutical companies and their lobbyists since the start of the pandemic. 48 MPs, four Baronesses and two Lords also put their name to a letter from Navendu Mishra, a Labour MP, to Prime Minister Johnson that same day stating “the UK must use its position on the international stage” to support the waiver.
12 The nearly 400 MEPs and members of parliaments across the EU who, the following day, urged the EU to support the waiver. “It is clear that we must urgently and exponentially increase manufacturing and availability of vaccines, tests, medicines and protective materials,” they wrote, “and that requires wider sharing of proprietary technology and knowhow, data and resources, especially with low- and middle-income countries.”
13 The 145 religious leaders who, on the same day, issued a statement rejecting “vaccine nationalism” and calling for vaccines to be “made available to all people as a global common good – a People’s Vaccine”, although they didn’t specifically mention the WTO, TRIPS or intellectual property rights. Those leaders included the Dalai Lama and the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. In an article in The Guardian, Williams acknowledged that the Peoples’ Vaccine Alliance has been calling for “the short-term waiver of patents”, among other things.
The next formal TRIPS Council meeting is due to take place tomorrow, 30 April, and the WTO’s next General Council meeting on 5 May. Will the UK government shift its position? No inkling of that from the UK mission to the WTO and UN in Switzerland, which didn’t respond to my attempts to contact them.