Coronavirus vaccines: why the world should support intellectual property right waivers

India and South Africa’s proposal to the WTO to exempt countries from enforcing some patent and IP rights is a targeted and proportionate response to the exceptional public health emergency that the world faces today

Brajendra Navnit

Published: 7:30pm, 3 Jan 2021

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A proposal by India, South Africa and other countries is calling on the World Trade Organisation to exempt member countries from enforcing some patents and other intellectual property rights under the organisation’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (Trips), for a limited period of time. This is to ensure that IPRs do not restrict the rapid scaling-up of manufacturing of Covid-19 vaccines and treatments.

Unprecedented times call for unorthodox measures. We saw this in the efficacy of strict lockdowns for a limited period, as a policy intervention, in curtailing the spread of the pandemic.

The International Monetary Fund in the October 2020 edition of its World Economic Outlook states that “the risk of worse growth outcomes than projected remains sizeable. If the virus resurges, progress on treatments and vaccines is slower than anticipated, or countries’ access to them remains unequal, economic activity could be lower than expected, with renewed social distancing and tighter lockdowns”.

The situation appears to be grimmer than predicted: we have already lost 7 per cent of economic output from the baseline scenario projected in 2019. It translates to a loss of more than US$6 trillion of global gross domestic product.

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Merely a signal to ensure timely and affordable access to vaccines and treatments will work as a big confidence booster for demand revival.

But how will these be made accessible and affordable to the global population? The fundamental question is whether there will be enough of Covid-19 vaccines to go around. As things stand, even the most optimistic scenarios today cannot ensure access to Covid-19 vaccines and therapeutics for most of the population, in rich as well as poor countries, by the end of 2021.

All the members of the WTO have agreed that there is an urgent need to scale up the manufacturing capacity for vaccines and therapeutics to meet the massive global need. The Trips waiver proposal seeks to fulfil this need by ensuring that IP barriers do not come in the way of such scaling up of manufacturing capacity.

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The existing flexibilities under the Trips Agreement are not adequate as these were not designed with pandemics in mind. Compulsory licences are issued on a country-by-country, case-by-case and product-by-product basis, where every jurisdiction with an IP regime would have to issue separate compulsory licences, making collaboration among countries extremely onerous.

Similarly, we have not seen a very encouraging progress on the World Health Organisation’s Covid-19 Technology Access Pool initiative, which encourages voluntary contribution of IP, technology and data to support the global sharing and scaling-up of the manufacturing of Covid-19 medical products.

Voluntary licences, even where they exist, are shrouded in secrecy. Their terms and conditions are not transparent. Their scope is limited to specific amounts or for a limited subset of countries, thereby encouraging nationalism rather than true international collaboration.

Volunteers wait to be checked at a vaccine trial facility for AstraZeneca at Soweto’s Chris Sani Baragwanath Hospital outside Johannesburg, South Africa, on November 30. Photo: AP

Global cooperation initiatives such as the Covax mechanism and the ACT-Accelerator are inadequate to meet the massive global needs of 7.8 billion people. The ACT-A initiative aims to procure 2 billion doses of vaccines by the end of next year and distribute them fairly around the world.

With a two-dose regime, however, this will only cover 1 billion people. That means that even if ACT-A is fully financed and successful, which is not the case presently, there would not be enough vaccines for most of the global population.

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During the initial few months of the current pandemic, we saw shelves being emptied by those who had access to masks, personal protective equipment, sanitisers, gloves and other essential Covid-19 items even without needing them immediately. The same should not happen with vaccines. Eventually, the world was able to ramp up manufacturing of Covid-19 essentials as there were no IP barriers hindering it.

At present, we need the same pooling of IP rights and know-how for scaling up the manufacturing of vaccines and treatments, which unfortunately has not been forthcoming, necessitating the need for the waiver.

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It is the pandemic – an extraordinary, once-in-a-lifetime event – that has mobilised the collaboration of multiple stakeholders. It is the knowledge and skills of scientists, researchers, public health experts and universities that enabled the cross-country collaborations and enormous public funding that has facilitated the development of vaccines in record time – and not IP alone.

The Trips waiver proposal is a targeted and proportionate response to the exceptional public health emergency that the world faces today. Such a waiver is well within the provisions of Article IX of the Marrakesh Agreement which established the WTO. It can help in ensuring that human lives are not lost for want of timely and affordable access to vaccines.

The adoption of the waiver will also re-establish WTO’s credibility and show that the multilateral trading system continues to be relevant and can deliver in a crisis. Now is the time for WTO members to act and adopt the waiver to save lives and help get the economy back on the path to revival quickly.

While making the vaccines available was a test of science, making them accessible and affordable is going to be a test of humanity. History should remember us for the “AAA rating” – for availability, accessibility and affordability – of Covid-19 vaccines and treatments and not for a single “A rating” for availability only. Our future generations deserve nothing less.

Brajendra Navnit is the ambassador and permanent representative of India to the WTO