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 Before
Biden's announcement on Wednesday, India and South Africa confirmed
their intention to draft a new waiver proposal at a WTO General
Council meeting, prompting the body's new Director General Ngozi
Okonjo-Iweala to express hope for "a pragmatic solution".
The two countries want to ease rules of the WTO's Trade-Related
Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS) agreement. WTO decisions
are based on consensus, so all 164 members must agree.
WHERE ARE THE TALKS NOW?
Ten WTO meetings in seven months have failed to produce a
breakthrough, with 60 proposal sponsors from emerging economies,
backed by a chorus of campaign groups, Nobel laureates and former
world leaders. They are pitted against richer developed countries,
such as Switzerland and members of the European Union, where many
pharmaceutical companies are based.
After the 10th round on April 30, India and South Africa said they
would revise their text from October in time for the next TRIPS
council meeting in the second half of May before further discussion
on June 8-9.
U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai said on Wednesday she would
pursue "text-based negotiations" on the WTO waiver, the standard but
tedious process for trade deal talks.
Negotiators trade texts with their preferred wording, then try to
find common ground, sometimes leaving blank spaces for thorny
differences to be settled by politicians.
Not only are the negotiations expected to be lengthy, they are also
likely to result in a waiver that is significantly narrower in scope
and shorter in duration than the one initially proposed by India and
South Africa, trade experts said.
All 164 WTO member countries must reach consent on such decisions,
with any one member able to veto them, so there could be a lot of
red pencils out. Negotiations are likely to be held in a mixture of
virtual and in-person meetings.
World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on
Monday the process needed to be completed as soon as possible. The
WHO said in April that of 700 million vaccines globally
administered, only 0.2% had been in low-income countries.
THE PROPONENTS' ARGUMENT
The Indian/South African proposal in October says property rights
such as patents, industrial designs, copyright and protection of
undisclosed information hinder timely access to affordable vaccines
and medicines essential to combat COVID-19.
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They say the waiver should last for an unspecified time period, with
an annual review until it terminates, and call for unhindered global
sharing of technology and know-how.
They say there cannot be a repeat of the early years of the HIV/AIDS
pandemic, when a lack of access to life-saving medicines cost
millions of African lives. In 2020, over half of all people living
with HIV were in South and East Africa, according to UNAIDS.
The WHO head and 375 civil society and campaign groups such as
Doctors Without Borders back the proposal. Former leaders from
Britain's Gordon Brown to the former Soviet Union's Mikhail
Gorbachev had jointly written to Biden urging him to support it.
THE COUNTER VIEW
Big drug companies generally oppose waiving rights to their
intellectual property. The main Western producers are Moderna,
Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca and jointly Pfizer and BioNTech. In
October, Moderna did though say it would not enforce its COVID-19
vaccine patents during the pandemic.
Big Pharma says vaccine development is unpredictable and costly and
that strong intellectual property protection helped provide the
incentive for the development of vaccines in record time and will do
so again in work on tackling new variants or in a future pandemic.
Proponents counter that some of the money was public funds.
Big Pharma also says vaccine-making is difficult - witness the
production problems non-specialist AstraZeneca has faced - so
suspending patents alone will not bring more shots.
Complex vaccines require deep cooperation between developers and
manufacturers. Any failure to make them properly could undermine
public confidence in safety, the companies say.
They also point to over 260 partnership agreements already in place
for production and distribution and comment that, under the existing
TRIPS agreement, governments can allow producers to make a patented
product without the consent of the patent owner. Developing
countries have such "compulsory licences" to push down prices for
HIV/AIDS medication from 2002 to 2007.
(Writing by Philip Blenkinsop and Nick Macfie; Editing by Andrew
Cawthorne)
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