My Take | Waive Covid-19 patents to help poor nations now
- Slow rate of vaccination in low-income countries using patented doses as insisted by rich countries means the world won’t achieve herd immunity for 4.6 years, new study says
“Vaccine nationalism perpetuates the long history of powerful countries securing vaccines and therapeutics at the expense of less-wealthy countries; it is short-sighted, ineffective and deadly,” a separate opinion piece in the same journal has argued.
An international programme called Covax Facility to distribute more doses to low-income countries has been off to a woefully slow start. That’s because rich countries such as the United States have squeezed dry the global vaccine supply, having ordered doses multiple times their current populations. Canada now has enough to vaccinate its entire population five times over.
Jomo Kwame Sundaram, a former United Nations assistant secretary general for economic development, has compared rich countries blocking efforts to produce generic vaccines to “genocide”.
“Refusal to temporarily suspend several World Trade Organization (WTO) intellectual property (IP) provisions to enable much faster and broader progress in addressing the Covid-19 pandemic should be grounds for International Criminal Court prosecution for genocide,” he wrote recently on Inter Press Service, a news agency.
“As Covid-19 infections and deaths continue to rise alarmingly, rich countries are falling out among themselves, fighting for access to vaccine supplies, as IP profits take precedence over lives and livelihoods.”