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Seven billion doses of vaccines against the new coronavirus have already been purchased or ordered, says Krishna Udayakumar, deputy director of the Innovation Center for Global Health at Duke University in North Carolina (USA). There could be one for every inhabitant of the planet. But the distribution will be more like the old statistical anecdote of the chicken division: If I eat two and you don’t eat, we both eat chicken.
“It is a goal and an aspiration to be able to vaccinate 60% of the African continent,” said John Nkengasong, a Cameroonian virologist who heads the Center for Disease Control and Prevention – Africa, an entity of the African Union created as the North American CDC. Nkengasong acknowledged that it is impossible for vaccination against the new coronavirus to start on the African continent before mid-2021, at best. And he estimated that 1.5 billion doses of vaccines would be needed, little more than the doses that the European Union has already purchased for its population.
However, the EU has 741.4 million inhabitants and the African continent, according to UN estimates, has 1.353 million inhabitants, almost double.
This is the picture of what is happening around the world: the richest countries, usually above the equator, have been quick to conclude agreements with pharmaceutical companies to finance the rapid development of vaccines against covid-19, by purchasing dose for your population. “3.7 billion doses have already been purchased by high-income countries, through bilateral agreements, 1.7 billion doses by lower-middle-income countries, and still 700 million by high-income countries,” says Udayakumar, whose team collected data for build a database.
“It is quite clear that the richest countries have chosen to think in themselves and have launched a race to buy as many doses of different vaccines in advance as possible. This means that they will have the vaccine before any other, ”Els Torreele, from the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose at University College London, trained in bioengineering and biomedicine but who does research on human rights, innovation and access to medicines, told PUBLIC. . In early November he published an analysis in the magazine Development on how the vaccine “race” is exposing the shortcomings of the medical innovation system.
Instead of increasing collective intelligence, he argues, this system of as usual It is based on competition between vaccines protected by patents, which allows lowering the level of demand for safety and efficacy of products, which puts people’s health at risk and reduces trust.
Despite the beautiful words, the warnings against “vaccine nationalism”, that was the path followed – with the President of the United States, Donald Trump, breaking new ground, when he even decided to leave the World Health Organization and disconnect from everything and everyone.
“Of course, rich countries want to protect themselves, but they are subverting global solidarity,” said Hu Yuan Qiong, legal adviser for Doctors Without Borders (MSF), on issues of access to medicines and intellectual property. “A lot of money has been invested to accelerate vaccine research, but there have been many public contributions, including from patients, that are not counted,” he said.
“The vaccines are based on a technological platform that would not have existed without the genome of the new coronavirus being rapidly sequenced, for example. And several come from research to develop a vaccine against the Ebola virus ”, he exemplified.
Suspend patents
MSF is one of many organizations supporting a proposal submitted by India and South Africa to the World Trade Organization (WTO) for the temporary suspension of some intellectual property rights, namely the TRIPS agreement, which opens doors to countries. the poorest to import or produce generic drugs.
India and South Africa have a pharmaceutical industry with a large capacity to produce vaccines or other drugs, already proven by the HIV / AIDS crisis. His proposal received support in the WTO from Mozambique and Pakistan. It was discussed at the WTO in October a week and a half ago, in an informal closed-door meeting, and what is known is that it provoked strong opposition from rich countries.
“We realized that the European Union, the United States, Canada, Japan, do not agree with this path. But these are the nations that have more than half of future covid19 vaccines, ”Hu said. “It seems to us a strange and highly debatable position, because on the one hand they follow an approach to defend their own interests. They are undermining global solidarity, because there simply are not enough doses of vaccines for everyone, ”he said.
“India and South Africa, in particular, can be very important in enabling global access to vaccines. The Serum Institute, India [o maior fabricante mundial de vacinas, por volume], for example, it has become an important vaccine factory for the world and has already invested significantly in increasing its production capacity for the covid-19 vaccine, ”Krishna Udayakumar told PUBLIC. In South Africa, several clinical trials of vaccines are underway, which have their counterparts at the local level. “This type of capacity allows the population to have access to high-quality production technology at affordable prices. It’s what we hope to see around the world, ”concluded Udayakumar.
But will the challenge launched by India and South Africa at the WTO have any chance of success? There is a new formal TRIPS council meeting on December 10 and 17 of the WTO general council, Hu says. An editorial by Wall street journal he called this attempt “an assault”, which shows the tone of the official narrative. Els Torreele, who was also an MSF consultant, does not believe that it is possible to duplicate the powerful pharmaceutical companies, which have the richest countries on their side.
“It is a very important political process. Intellectual property should not, now or never, be a barrier to public health, ”said Torreele. But is it realistic? Probably not. Because power dynamics are not in your favor. But it is very important to pressure them to understand that there is no point in continuing to defend indefensible positions: private interests against public health ”.
