COVID-19: The poor must wait years for the jab

Governments were relieved, vastly so; the media gushed; pharmaceutical companies were elated and rushed to book profits. The development of three vaccines against the novel coronavirus SARS-COV-2 in a record time of a year and less is, indeed, one for the history books. But as the hurrahs die down, elation is being replaced by the more sobering thought that although the success of Pfizer-BioNtech, Moderna and Astra Zeneca could be a turning point in the pandemic, the world has a long, long way to go before it can breathe easy.

By now, everyone knows the bulk of the vaccines will go to the rich world, thanks to estimates made by health advocacy organisations. Production of the vaccines in the foreseeable future has already been booked by a handful of countries who account for just 13 per cent of the global population. Advocacy groups have warned us that the highest bidders — the United States, United Kingdom, the European Union, Canada, Japan and Israel head the list — have grabbed close to 80 per cent of the doses that will be available over the next year.

While governments in poor nations, such as Narendra Modi’s in India, continue to mollify their people that relief is round the corner, the fact is most people (80 per cent) in these countries will not get the promised jab until at least 2022. That’s the optimistic calculation. Pharma industry analysts poring over the available production capacity data of the innovator companies and their contractual partners think not until 2024.

Even in rich countries just half the population will have access to the vaccines they have helped fund. Without technology transfer to produce vaccines massively, we are doomed.

And the scale of public funding is phenomenal. Pfizer-BioNTech got $2.5 billion, Moderna $2.48 billion and Astra Zeneca-Oxford University $1.7 billion to develop their vaccines. No one is disputing that he who pays the piper calls the tune, but why are the rich nations who funded most, if not the entire cost of these vaccines, giving the companies a free hand to fix the price (predatory in one case) and to decide where to supply the much-needed jabs?

With patents granting them 20-year monopolies these companies will be free to profiteer even in a pandemic. Ironically, the new vaccine technologies are based on earlier breakthroughs by other research companies, including a government laboratory.

With successful vaccine companies set to make billions of dollars in profits next year, complex patent battles are already being fought that could stymie the rollout of the vaccines. And yet, rich countries clearly in the thrall of the powerful pharma lobby, are unwilling to acknowledge that patents act as an insurmountable barrier to access and equitable healthcare for billions of poor people worldwide.

Instead, rejecting the India-South Africa proposal at the World Trade Organisation to keep patents in abeyance till the pandemic is over, the UK blandly stated that “beyond hypotheticals”, it has not been able to identify ways in which intellectual property right (IPR) acts as a barrier to accessing vaccines, treatments or technologies to fight covid-19. It was backed by the usual suspects along with others like Brazil and Norway. But there is also a public demand to suspend IPRs till the pandemic is over. That voice needs to be louder.