Last July, during the presidential campaign,
Joe Biden
promised the universal health care advocate Ady Barkan that he wouldn’t let
intellectual property laws stand in the way of worldwide access to coronavirus
vaccines.
اضافة اعلان
“The World Health Organization is leading an unprecedented
global effort to promote international cooperation in the search for COVID-19
treatments and vaccines,” Barkan said. “But Donald Trump has refused to join
that effort, cutting America off from the rest of the world. If the US
discovers a vaccine first, will you commit to sharing that technology with
other countries, and will you ensure there are no patents to stand in the way
of other countries and companies mass-producing those lifesaving vaccines?”
Biden was unequivocal. “It lacks any human dignity, what
we’re doing,” he said of Trump’s vaccine isolationism. “So the answer is yes,
yes, yes, yes, yes. And it’s not only a good thing to do, it’s overwhelmingly
in our interest to do.”
Yet now that Biden is in power, his perception of our
interest doesn’t seem quite so clear. Last year, India and South Africa
requested a waiver from
World Trade Organization (WTO) rules governing
intellectual property for technology dealing with the pandemic. Dozens of
mostly developing countries have since joined them. A handful of rich nations,
including the United States, oppose the waiver, but there’s a widespread belief
that if America changes its position, other countries will follow. Much of the
world is waiting to see what Biden does.
There’s an enormous consensus in favor of a waiver. It
includes dozens of Nobel laureates and the former leaders of Britain, Canada,
Costa Rica, France, Malawi, New Zealand, and many other countries. Ten
Democratic senators have asked Biden to accede to India and South Africa’s request.
Representative Jan Schakowsky of Illinois is helping to organize a letter from
members of the House, and so far almost 100 have signed on.
Most major health and human rights NGOs have joined the
campaign for a waiver, including Doctors Without Borders, Partners in Health,
Human Rights Watch, and Oxfam International.
“This is, I think, one of the first promises broken,” Asia
Russell, the executive director of the Health Global Access Project, an
international advocacy organization, said of the Biden administration’s failure
to support a waiver, at least so far. She compares it to the administration’s
brief refusal to lift Trump’s refugee caps. “That was pretty completely
reversed,” she said. “And this one has not been. And we’re in a pandemic. If
not now, when?”
To be fair, this issue is more complicated than that of
refugee admissions. It’s easy enough to dismiss arguments from Big Pharma that
lifting intellectual property protections will stifle innovation, given the
enormous public subsidies that underlie the creation of the vaccines. “US
taxpayers have invested huge amounts into making this happen,” Schakowsky said.
But other arguments deserve to be taken seriously.
Dr Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical
Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine and a vaccine expert, isn’t against
lifting the waiver, but thinks intellectual property isn’t the most important
barrier to expanding vaccine access.
“It is an issue, but I wouldn’t put it at the top of the
list,” he said. “Even if you were to liberalize all the patent restrictions
completely tomorrow, it wouldn’t make a difference for this pandemic, I don’t
think. And the reason is because the biggest problem is the technical
know-how.” He argues that giving countries the formula for the vaccines won’t
be enough if there isn’t a workforce trained to make them.
Hotez is working with a company in India to produce 1
billion doses of a “people’s vaccine,” a low-cost, easy-to-manufacture COVID
inoculation that’s finishing up Phase 2 trials. He’d like the US government to
help him produce 5 billion doses.
“These new technology vaccines are exciting and they’re very
innovative, but with a brand-new technology, it’s difficult to go from zero to
5 billion very quickly,” he said.
But while a WTO waiver isn’t sufficient to solve the vaccine
shortage, it would be a start. In a recent letter to activist groups, Ngozi
Okonjo-Iweala, the director general of the WTO, acknowledged that there is
“untapped production potential in the developing world. Getting the intellectual
property and technology transfer dimension right is clearly critical to
unlocking this potential.”
Many of the world’s most accomplished public health figures
believe that a waiver is a first step in allowing this process to begin.
“Every day we don’t put progressive policies in place is a
day lost to saving more lives, so more people die,” Russell said. “Because you
can’t flip that switch overnight — you need six months, one year, beyond, to
gear this up. It doesn’t take forever, by any stretch. But the longer we say it
will take too long, it will take much too long.”
Right now, widespread vaccination is freeing many Americans
from a year of terror and isolation, even as new waves of the pandemic ravage
countries like India and Brazil. Low and middle-income countries say that a
temporary change to global trade rules will help them defend themselves. Does
the Biden administration really want to stand against them?
You can argue that America needs to help vaccinate the world
to stem the evolution of new variants, or to reassert global leadership at a
time when Russia and China have been engaged in much more effective vaccine
diplomacy. But the real reason to do everything possible to help countries get
the vaccines they need to combat this plague is the one Biden articulated to
Ady Barkan last year.
“This is the only humane thing in the world to do,” he said.
So he should do it.
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