WTO approves vaccine-patent waiver to help combat coronavirus pandemic

The World Trade Organisation (WTO) approved a politically important deal on Friday to water down intellectual property restrictions for the manufacture of Covid-19 vaccines after an almost two-year effort involving scores of high-level meetings and much political arm twisting.

During the early morning hours in Geneva, WTO ministers approved a package of agreements that included the vaccine patent waiver, which director-general Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala previously said was necessary to end the “morally unacceptable inequity of access to Covid-19 vaccines”.

The WTO’s last-minute deal, secured after an all-night negotiating session in Geneva, is an important victory for Okonjo-Iweala, the former head of Gavi — the vaccine alliance, who actively stumped for the accord during her first year as the WTO’s top trade official.

At the same time, the deal delivers a significant blow to vaccine manufacturers such as Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca, which fought hard to prevent nations from undermining the intellectual-property framework that enabled them to produce multiple viable vaccines in record time.

“The premise of an intellectual-property [IP] waiver for Covid-19 vaccines was flawed from the outset, said Thomas Cueni, the director-general of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations. “To this day, there is no evidence that IP has been a barrier to Covid-19 vaccine production or access.”

“We are disappointed with the inadequate outcome on waiving intellectual property for Covid-19 medical tools that resulted from more than 20 months of deliberations,” said Dr Christos Christou, international president of Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders.

“We acknowledge that a few changes were made to the agreement that mitigated some of the most worrisome elements of the earlier text presented in May 2022, but overall, we are disappointed that a true intellectual property waiver, proposed in October 2020 covering all Covid-19 medical tools and including all countries, could not be agreed, even during a pandemic that has claimed more than 15 million people’s lives.”

The debate overcame a protracted fight between the US and China over the Biden administration’s demand that China be clearly excluded from the deal — for fear that it would enable China to steal US technologies.

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Vaccines have become a flashpoint for trade protectionism and many US policymakers want to prevent China from obtaining access to the mRNA technology that Pfizer, BioNTech SE and Moderna used to produce coronavirus inoculations.

Though the Biden administration supported the idea of waiving IP rights for a vaccine, it never offered full-throated support for the deal until it emerged in the early hours in Geneva. The deal will likely result in heavy political blowback from the US pharmaceutical sector and from Republican politicians who oppose it.

In recent weeks, US trade representative Katherine Tai found herself targeted by former Capitol Hill colleagues for negotiating a back-room deal that many politicians feared would undermine American innovation.

Ultimately, the negotiation took so long and the global vaccine manufacturing effort worked so quickly that the WTO’s final deal will not have a meaningful impact on the production of Covid-19 jabs, as there is a global glut of them.

Supply-side constraint

As of May, there were 2.1 billion excess doses of coronavirus vaccines and their production has consistently outpaced the number of doses administered, according to data from the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations.

“There is no longer a supply-side constraint on the availability of vaccines, said Chad Bown, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

This week, a key proponent for the IP waiver, Indian trade minister Piyush Goyal, publicly acknowledged that “not a single plant to make manufacturing of vaccines will come with this agreement”.

India blamed powerful nations for dragging out the negotiations for so long that it finally lost its relevance as pharmaceutical manufacturers were ultimately able to produce an oversupply of vaccines.

“What we are getting is completely half-baked and it will not allow us to make any vaccines, said Mr Goyal. “Vaccines have already lost relevance, he added. “It’s just too late; there is no demand for vaccines anymore.” — Bloomberg