May 18, 2022
Global South responsibility to utilize TRIPS waiver
May 6 2022 interview with Achal Probhala, Indian Coordinator of the AccessIBSA project, which campaigns for access to medicines in India, Brazil and South Africa. Democracy Now! https://www.democracynow.org/2022/5/6/who_finds_15_million_pandemic_deaths
India and South Africa, about a year and a half ago, went to the World Trade Organization to ask for a pause, a temporary suspension of pharmaceutical monopolies, so that not just vaccines but things like Paxlovid, the new wonder drug from Pfizer, that, if taken a few days after being diagnosed with COVID, dramatically reduces your chance of dying due to COVID — so that drugs and vaccines in the pandemic could be more widely available. It’s been a year and a half. There’s been almost no movement — in fact, negative movement. And the truth is that India and South Africa are asking for permission to do something that they’re already allowed to do. They have a full legal right, under the World Trade Organization’s own rules and emergency exceptions, to create what we would call a national TRIPS waiver. And, in fact, the government of Brazil, surprisingly, did this last year in September without waiting for the World Trade Organization to tell them that it could do so. We’ve been asking a year and a half for permission to do something we’re already allowed to do. And at this stage of the pandemic, I think it’s ridiculous for poor countries to blame everything on what Western countries aren’t doing for them, and I think they have to begin to think very seriously about what they can do for themselves.
And the second piece of this puzzle, which I think also there’s been inaction around, is to figure out how to have access to mRNA technology. At the moment, mRNA vaccines are by far our best chance at protecting against transmission of the Omicron variant, which is why in the United States you get a Pfizer or Moderna vaccine as a booster, and you can’t actually get a J&J vaccine, or, in Europe, you can’t get an AstraZeneca vaccine as a booster. But that’s all we have. So the entire country of India has zero access to an mRNA vaccine today.
But more importantly, in about three or four months, the mRNA vaccine manufacturers are very likely to be the first vaccine makers to come up with an Omicron booster or a bivalent booster that works against Omicron and the Delta variant. They have plans to introduce these vaccines in the fall. At that point, that vaccine will be the only vaccine worth taking anywhere in the world. And 92 poor countries — about half the world’s population — has no access to those vaccines. In two years we’re likely to have things like an HIV vaccine on the mRNA platform, or cancer medicines of all kinds. None of those mRNA medicines and vaccines, now or in the future, are available to us.
But we also haven’t fully noticed, and the governments of these countries need to understand what they don’t have and figure out ways that they can get them. And I think a part of the reason that countries like India aren’t doing so is it is again an admission of political failure. The idea that they need something that they don’t have and have to work to get it, I think, points to a kind of weakness, which they don’t want to admit.
