The World Trade Organization agreed Friday to temporarily lift patents on
Covid-19 vaccines after two years of bruising negotiations, but experts
expressed scepticism that the deal will have a major impact on global
vaccination inequality.
اضافة اعلان
The unprecedented agreement, sealed by all 164 WTO members after late-night
overtime talks, will grant developing countries the right to produce Covid
vaccines for five years "without the consent of the right holder".
Since October 2020, South Africa and India have called for intellectual
property rights for coronavirus vaccines to be temporarily lifted so they can
boost production to address the gaping inequality in access between rich and
poor nations.
But Friday's compromise fell short of their earlier requests that the waiver
apply to all countries -- and also cover Covid tests and treatments.
Under the terms of the new deal, WTO members have six months to decide on
whether to extend the measures "to cover the production and supply of
Covid-19 diagnostics and therapeutics".
"This does not correspond to the initial request," said Jerome
Martin, the co-founder of the Drug Policy Transparency Observatory, pointing to
the fact that the deal only includes developing countries.
"We have to see what it does in the field, but it is not ambitious at
all," he told AFP.
- 'Disappointing' -
James Love, director of Knowledge Ecology International, said it was "a
limited and disappointing outcome".
"The fact that the exception is limited to vaccines, has a five-year
duration and does not address WTO rules on trade secrets makes it particularly
unlikely to provide expanded access to Covid-19 counter-measures," he said
in a statement.
"The pressure this week was to reach consensus in order to make
multilateralism look like it works, which seems to have been the main
justification for producing this decision."
Max Lawson, co-chair of the People's Vaccine Alliance and Oxfam's head of
inequality, singled out Switzerland, Britain and the European Union for
"blocking anything that resembles a meaningful intellectual property
waiver".
"The conduct of rich countries at the WTO has been utterly
shameful," he said.
The agreement also disappointed the pharmaceutical lobby group IFPMA, which
warned that "dismantling" patent protections would strangle
innovation.
"The single biggest factor affecting vaccine scarcity is not
intellectual property, but trade. This has not been fully addressed by the
World Trade Organization," said IFPMA's director general Thomas Cueni.
And while vaccine doses were scarce early in the pandemic, that is no longer
the case.
Nearly 14 billion doses had been produced worldwide as of mid-June,
according to research group Airfinity.
As supply soars, some vaccine makers like the giant Serum Institute of India
have stopped producing doses due to falling demand.
Yet many developing countries still lag far behind the rest of the world in
vaccination rates.
While 60 percent of the world's population has received two vaccine doses,
that number falls to 17 percent in Libya, eight percent in Nigeria and less
than five percent in Cameroon, according to the World Health Organization.
Pharma groups have said that the logistics involved in distributing vaccines
in developing countries is a far bigger hurdle to rolling out doses.
- 'Wealthy
countries failed' -
Even India, which fought long and hard for the waiver, expressed doubts
about whether the final compromise deal would have an effect.
Earlier this week, Indian Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal said
that "my own feeling is, not a single factory, not one, will ever come up
with the agreement that we are finally trying to negotiate and which may get
approved."
"It is just too late," he said in a statement.
It marks the first time the WTO has temporarily lifted patents on vaccines,
though in 2001 it set up a compulsory licensing mechanism for HIV
treatments.
Francois Pochart, a patent specialist at the August Debouzy law firm in
Paris, said that the new WTO agreement is "a step forward" compared
to those compulsory licences.
"Countries can decide on their own without having to make a request.
The real novelty is that this waiver allows the country that produces the
vaccine to also export to other markets, to another eligible member," he
said.
But Christos Christou, the president of Doctors Without Borders, branded the
deal "a devastating global failure".
"Despite lofty political commitments and words of solidarity, it has
been discouraging for us to see that wealthy countries failed to resolve the
glaring inequities in access to lifesaving Covid-19 medical tools for people in
low- and middle-income countries."
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