Scientists, community members and activists are gathering outside Moderna’s headquarters as part of a global action day for equitable access to vaccines in Cambridge, Mass., On March 11, 2021.
Photo: Jessica Rinaldi / The Boston Globe via Getty Images
The end of The apartheid of Covid-19 vaccine can not be overestimated. As of mid-February, the United States had received enough vaccines for three times its total population, while not a single vaccine had been administered in 130 countries. This is no coincidence, but the direct and long-predicted result of a vaccine production and access model linked to privatized intellectual property and entrenched drug monopolies.
The majority of Americans want President Joe Biden to act to end this unbearable inequality in vaccines. Sixty percent of U.S. voters say they want Biden to endorse a motion by the World Trade Organization that waives patent barriers and other important intellectual property protection on Covid-19 vaccines, according to a new Data for Progress poll. and the Progressive International. This will allow for a significant expansion of global production and rollout, while disrupting the extraordinary pursuit of pharmaceutical leviatans in a deadly pandemic.
The refusal of large pharmaceutical companies and Western powers to ensure the sharing of information on vaccines and production was an immeasurable moral failure, not to mention a foolish approach to a pandemic that needs a global response. The new poll also makes it clear that vaccine blocking is not even a popular position for Biden. Seventy-two percent of registered Democrats want the president to remove patent barriers to speed up vaccine vaccination and reduce costs for less affluent countries.
At present, the WTO rules on intellectual property mean that most countries are banned from producing the leading vaccines that have been approved, including those by Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson, which are manufactured in the USA. Last October, South Africa and India submitted a proposal to the WTO for a temporary waiver that would apply to certain intellectual property on Covid-19 medical instruments and technologies until herd immunity is achieved worldwide.
It has received majority support from member states: one hundred countries generally support the proposal, and 58 governments are now co-sponsors; 375 civil society organizations, including Doctors Without Borders, Oxfam and Amnesty International, have signed a letter of support.
However, the waiver was blocked by a small number of affluent nations and blocs, including the US, the UK and the EU, who chose to leave vaccine production in the hands of only a few pharmaceutical companies, led by private partnerships. their turn ensures priority access to the rich countries.
There are no legal grounds to maintain patent barriers in this health crisis unless you are a pharmaceutical giant worth billions, or of course a Western power invested in maintaining world power through neoliberalization, market monopolies and racist capitalism. The strongest proponents of intellectual property protection in medicine, including Bill Gates, have offered no ethical basis for the current status quo other than vague gestures to protect ‘innovation’.
Even a self-serving approach, which sees the devastating economic possibilities of a mutating virus that makes the pandemic into something endemic, should make clear the need for a patent release. The commitment to monopolistic medicine is ideological in this sense.
The WTO waiver the proposal must be supported by a consensus of the organization’s 164 members to pass. It was under President Donald Trump that the US blocked the patent release: a move that came as no surprise to an administration of white nationalists who proudly left the World Health Organization. A change by the Biden government, which rejoined the WHO on Day One, could go a long way towards encouraging other affluent countries.
The Data for Progress and the Progressive International poll make it clear that Biden has a popular mandate to take action against vaccine apartheid. Burcu Kilic, research director of the Program for Access to Medicine at Public Citizen and a member of the Board of Progressive International, called on Biden to ‘listen to Americans who put him in power’ and ‘do the right thing’ .
Sen. Bernie Sanders, IV., Chair of the Senate Budget Committee, responded to the poll, saying the US “should lead the global effort to end the coronavirus pandemic”. According to Sanders, a temporary WTO waiver, which allows the transfer of vaccine technologies to poorer countries, is a good way to do that. ‘More than 60 lawmakers have added their signatures to a letter urging Biden to save lives through a global vaccination campaign.
For a number of years, public health organizations and civil society groups have called for an internationalized pandemic response to public resources research and medical resources. Such calls for cooperation and fairness were quickly thwarted, thanks to the work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. As Alexander Zaitchik noted in an important piece for The New Republic, Gates’ long history of cruising intellectual property instituted a Covid-19 vaccine response in line with a status quo “defined by a zero-sum vaccination struggle that” a large part of the world has set in motion the losing side. ”
I am not the first to highlight the colonialist regime that shaped this unequal vaccination scenario. Sharon Lerner reports for The Intercept that countries, including Argentina, South Africa, Brazil and Turkey, which hosted Pfizer vaccine trials, have been excluded from adequate access to vaccines. The same withdrawal practices that have historically enriched Western powers through the direct cost and suffering of colonized peoples continue to this day with the deadliest consequences – vaccine apartheid among them.
Whether Biden, no enemy of neoliberalism, will take a stand against the approach of the canonized philanthropist Gates is not yet clear. It is now unmistakable that American voters, along with the broad public health community, want him to.