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 South Africa and India, which both manufacture drugs and vaccines,
made the proposal at the World Trade Organization (WTO) last year,
arguing that intellectual property (IP) rules were hindering the
urgent scale-up of vaccine production and provision of medical
products to some patients.
They have faced opposition from some developed nations, but the
backing of the African Union (AU) may give renewed impetus for the
push to relax IP rules.
John Nkengasong, director of the Africa Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention, told a news conference that IP transfer was a
"win-win for everybody" that would address the huge inequalities in
global public health.
He gave two examples where the developing world had suffered because
of restricted access to medicines: the swine flu pandemic in the
late 2000s and HIV/AIDS in the 1990s.
"In 1996, HIV drugs were available, and we saw how mortality in the
developed world decreased drastically. But it would take 10 years
before those drugs were accessible in Africa in any meaningful way,"
he said.
"In between, 12 million Africans died, so I just use those numbers
to say: any IP transfer will be beneficial to everybody, because
nobody wants to sit back and be proud of that sad event ... We want
to be on the right side of history."
[to top of second column] |
 Nkengasong added the Africa
CDC's regulatory taskforce had approved two
versions of AstraZeneca's COVID-19 vaccine for
emergency use, a day after Ghana received its
first AstraZeneca doses from global vaccine
distribution facility COVAX.
He said the developers of Russia's Sputnik V
vaccine had submitted a "full dossier" of data
to the Africa CDC and that in the coming days an
expert panel would review the data and make a
pronouncement.
"We have not received dossiers yet from China
colleagues, but we remain optimistic that they
will submit to us," he continued.
Several countries on the continent, including
Egypt, Zimbabwe and Senegal, have already
started rolling out Chinese COVID-19 shots.
(Reporting by Alexander Winning in Johannesburg
and Omar Mohammed in Nairobi; Editing by Joe
Bavier and Mark Potter)
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