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Western countries should help India and South Africa to buy licenses.
Gauri Khandekar is a researcher at the Brussels School of Governance at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Miguel Otero is a senior analyst at the Elcano Royal Institute of Madrid.
World leaders seem to finally be getting the idea that no country will be safe from COVID-19 until the majority of the world’s population is vaccinated. But their well-intentioned statements will be meaningless if they continue to let business interests and geopolitics get in the way of a global vaccine launch.
Production of the world’s most effective vaccines is concentrated in the hands of some of the major pharmaceutical companies, with rich countries taking the costly blows first, ordering up to four times the number they need to protect their populations.
Meanwhile, despite new commitments at the G7 last week, only about 20 percent of the Global South can expect to receive vaccines from the World Health Organization’s COVAX initiative by the end of 2021 at the earliest.
It is too late and the number of vaccines these countries will receive is too low to produce herd immunity. And it has implications that go beyond the Global South, increasing the likelihood of new, deadlier strains emerging that require new vaccines and distribution efforts.
If we really want to win the war against COVID-19, we need a more effective solution.
India and South Africa have already proposed a new approach at the World Trade Organization: forego COVID-19 vaccine patents so these countries can mobilize their proven generic pharmaceutical industries to produce more vaccines and distribute them faster.
Your case is compelling. In the midst of a global pandemic, a temporary patent exemption makes perfect sense. India already produces 60 percent of the world’s vaccines, and the privately owned Serum Institute of India (SII) is currently producing the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine (known in India as Covishield) at a rate of 70 million to 80 million. of doses per month. India’s pharmaceutical value chains are extensive and more adaptable than the old industries of the West, which are established in their own way.
However, rich countries, led by the United States and the European Union, where these vaccines were generated, have rejected this initiative. They want to protect their pharmaceutical industries against competition from emerging markets, including India, China and South Africa.
Their arguments are also reasonable: If pharmaceutical companies are forced to hand over their intellectual property for free, they would lack incentives to continue research, which could hamper the development of new vaccines that are effective against emerging strains of COVID- 19.
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There are geopolitical considerations at play, too, on both sides, as countries struggle to get ahead in an emerging vaccine diplomacy race.
Within days after it began inoculating its own population, India began donating millions of its indigenous vaccines to other countries. New Delhi has also pledged more than 1 billion coronavirus vaccines this year to various countries and to the COVAX initiative. China and Russia have also been selling or donating their own domestically produced vaccines, especially in Africa.
Recognizing the erosion of Western influence, French President Emmanuel Macron called for 3-5 percent of the vaccine supply from Europe and the United States to be shipped to developing countries. Shortly thereafter, the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, announced that the EU would double its contribution to the COVAX plan from € 500 million to € 1 billion and pledged another € 100 million in humanitarian aid for the deployment of the vaccination in Africa.
But while everyone wants to be seen playing savior, there is no cooperation between the main players. This means that we are stuck: the EU and the US remain unwilling to accept patent exemptions, while India and South Africa remain unwilling or unable to pay pharmaceutical companies for the licenses needed to produce the vaccines.
Therefore, the solution must be found elsewhere.
If the problem is that the licenses are too expensive or that South Africa and India are unwilling to pay such large sums, then the EU and the US should help subsidize these purchases. After all, they are interested in doing it.
It is important to emphasize here that the solution must be negotiated. Compulsory licensing, as some have argued, would lead to the same problems as a patent exemption, although the prospect can certainly be used as a pressure mechanism to lower the price of the license.
The best option going forward is to opt for purchases based on the value of intellectual property rights or licenses, as suggested by Elias Mossialos, professor of public health at the London School of Economics, among others.
This strategy would satisfy all actors. Pharmaceutical companies would receive fair compensation. The EU and the US could claim credit for funding the effort. India and South Africa (and many others) could produce the vaccines we need.
Given the high stakes, an agreement of this caliber could only be achieved at the highest political level. The G20, under the Italian presidency of the new Mario Draghi government, could be the most appropriate platform to convene an extraordinary meeting of the parties involved.
If the goal is to reach the end of this pandemic, it would be foolish not to tap into idle production capacity in India and elsewhere as soon as possible. The faster we get to global herd immunity, the better, for everyone.
