The World Trade Organisation will be starting its two-day General Council meeting today on March 1. Part of the agenda will be to inform Member States that negotiations are still ongoing on the request to waive intellectual property rights on vaccines and other anti-Covid-19 technologies. The situation remains urgent. The waiver is meant to plug the distribution gap by scaling up the production of vaccines and other therapeutics in developing countries to ease access. Even as the vaccines have already started rolling out in Africa and elsewhere, various projections show that adequate vaccination coverage may not be possible to allow life returning to normal in the vast majority of poor countries earlier than 2023. This is despite the Covax facility and other initiatives, including the recent commitments by G7 leaders. In rich countries, some of which have already inoculated nearly half their populations, life is set to have attained a semblance of normality by end this year. The irony is they may not be safe. It has been stressed enough times how no one anywhere in the world will be safe from the Covid-19 and its variants until everybody everywhere is inoculated. It is therefore inevitable the iniquitous distribution of the vaccines has drawn global ire with loud calls for equal access. We have been here before. The strident calls bear the hallmarks of the battle 20 years ago for access to affordable HIV drugs. Even then, it pitted developing countries, enjoined by coalitions of activists and organisations such as Médecins Sans Frontières, against the rich countries and their major pharmaceutical corporations (Big Pharma). The only difference is the bare-knuckle tactics Big Pharma employed then. It is still memorable how in 1998, for instance, they took the South African government to court to stop it introducing laws aimed at making essential medicines, especially HIV drugs, more affordable. Pressure from activists and the international uproar it drew forced the pharmaceutical companies to withdraw the case. But the forces ranged against developing countries, and how it played out to introduce the laws in Kenya is another classic example of the fight. After successfully lobbying Members of Parliament in 2001, a coalition of activists warned the Kenyan government of a likely plot by the Pharma to influence the MPs to thwart the legislative process to enact the law. The concerns were not unfounded. A month after the country’s president assented the law in July that year, an amendment was “secretly” drafted and passed without the knowledge of stakeholders. The amendment erased some of the gains the new Act had won against Big Pharma. The furore this caused would lead to the amendment being withdrawn, restoring the Act as it had originally been passed. The fights are worth recalling if only to show the distance we have come. But, in the end, it took concerted international effort at the WTO leading to the 2003 mechanism of compulsory licences that benefitted countries with no manufacturing capacity of pharmaceuticals. In Rwanda, for example, that is how Canada was able to issue the 2007 compulsory licence to meet the country’s need for essential drugs. In the current negotiations, rich countries had insisted that compulsory licensing as approved in 2003, including the attendant parallel importation, would be adequate for the vaccines. But as developing countries have strongly argued, the flexibilities fall short to address the Covid-19 pandemic, whose magnitude and pace of infections presents exceptional circumstances. This means it requires robust regional and global collaboration. The waiver will allow for more robust access to affordable vaccines and medicines, as well as permit scaling-up of research, development, manufacturing and supply of medical products essential to combat COVID-19. It is intended for the duration of the pandemic until global immunity is achieved. One might say the battle for equal access began 20-some years ago. And if the waiver is accepted, the tussle it has entailed should be the last in anticipation of the next pandemic, which experts are certain is just around the corner. We shall know how possible later this month, before sanction of the outcome of the negotiations at the next General Council meeting in June.
