Does the U.S. Support Waiving IP Protections for Covid-19 Vaccines?
While this is a positive first step, we still don't know the substance of the administration's negotiations at the World Trade Organization.
After months of refusing to waive the patents on covid-19 vaccines the Biden administration recently announced that it supports waiving intellectual property protections for covid-19 vaccines. Waiving IP protections for covid-19 vaccinations would make it possible to manufacture more vaccines that could be used to stop the pandemic from raging in the global south. However, both parties and their pharmaceutical industry donors have continued to work behind the scenes to pressure the administration into maintaining the IP protections for covid-19 vaccinations.
Even though activists have been demanding that the United States and other wealthy countries waive covid-19 vaccine patents since former President Donald Trump initially blocked the patent waiver before withdrawing from the World Health Organization (WHO), the most recent push to waive the patents was initiated by a catastrophic surge of covid-19 in India. According to The New Yorker, India has been one of the countries most impacted by covid-19, but that by December 2020 life had “almost returned to normal”. Unfortunately, cases began to rise again in March, and today India now home to the worst covid-19 outbreak in the world. The New Yorker describes the current surge in India as:
“a medical and humanitarian crisis on a scale not yet seen during the pandemic…some experts estimate that millions of Indians are infected each day; thousands are dying, with more deaths going uncounted or unreported…Hospitals are running out of oxygen, staff, and beds; makeshift funeral pyres burn through the night as crematoriums are flooded with dead bodies.”
While this is a positive first step towards waiving the patents so vaccines can be manufactured for the global south, some media outlets have claimed that Biden has already stood up to big pharma and kept his promise to waive vaccine patents that he made on the campaign trail. However, without knowing the substance of what the administration’s terms are in the negotiations for a new patent waiver, the public has no idea if Joe Biden actually “kept his promise” or not.
The administrations’ press release said that negotiations at the World Trade Organization (WTO) will take some time, and they stressed that they’d continue to “ramp up” efforts working with the private sector to expand vaccine manufacturing and distribution. While some in the establishment press see no problem with ramping up collaboration with the private sector, as long as the administration is working closely with the private sector the public should be suspicious of their actions since they usually aren’t in our best interests.
For example, most outlets have incorrectly reported that the United States is now supporting the original TRIPS waiver that Global South governments have been supporting for months when in reality the U.S. is working to negotiate a new waiver at the WTO that could potentially look nothing like the original TRIPS waiver requested by countries like South Africa and India. The results of negotiations very well might come out looking similar to the original waiver, but why would the Biden administration request to negotiate a new waiver if they didn’t want to do more to protect the interests of big pharma and their investors?
A major difference between the original TRIPS waiver that Global South governments have been supporting for months is that the original waiver covered both vaccines and therapeutics, while the new waiver requested by the United States would only cover vaccines. According to tropical disease advisor, Julien Potet, it’s much easier to copy therapeutics through reverse engineering than it is to copy vaccines because therapeutics are “small-molecule drugs”.
In a tweet following the announcement, co-host of the Citations Needed podcast, Adam H. Johnson said,
“If the Biden Admin wanted to support the India/South Africa proposed TRIPS waiver they would have. The fact that they didn’t and want to start from scratch means we do not know the substance of what they’re proposing. Unitl this substance is known we should wait to celebrate imo”
While this is a positive first step towards waiving covid-19 vaccine patents, thereby making it possible to manufacture doses to vaccinate the global south, the results of the new negotiations are still uncertain. However, what is certain is that as soon as the Biden administration announced that it would support waiving IP protections for covid-19 vaccine patents, Pfizer, Biotech, Novavax, and Moderna stock prices all plummeted to session lows according to CNBC News.
This caused some members of Congress who receive bountiful bribes from the pharmaceutical industry to attempt to rally their colleagues against the administration's efforts to make the covid-19 vaccine more accessible to the global south. According to The Huffington Post, Democratic representatives Scott Peters and Ron Kind, who are among the top 25 recipients of contributions from pharmaceutical industry lobbying groups have sent a letter to President Biden, urging him to “continue denying developing countries request for a temporary waiver from intellectual property rules” that make it nearly impossible for the global south to mass-produce covid-19 vaccines developed in the United States and Europe.
It’s important to remember that we’re only in this situation because former President Trump chose to put pharmaceutical industry profits over people’s lives by blocking the initial request at the WTO for patent waivers on covid-19 vaccines. Joe Biden could have ended this genocidal policy on his first day in office, but for some reason, it took him more than one hundred days just to enter into negotiations at the WTO to potentially waive vaccine patents. One of the main reasons why the bipartisan establishment took so long to even rhetorically support covid-19 vaccine patent waivers was to allow pharmaceutical companies to make billions in profits off vaccines that were created through publically funded research.
Even though these vaccines were created through publically funded research, gigantic private pharmaceutical corporations like Pfizer have been able to profit to the tune of $26 billion, while the public that made the creation of these vaccines possible haven’t seen a cent. According to The Intercept, one of the strongest advocates of maintaining IP protections during the pandemic has been Bill Gates, who they say has “offered no ethical basis for the current status quo beyond vague gestures to protecting ‘innovation'”. Unless you’re a pharmaceutical corporation making billions or someone who’s personally invested in the industry, there is no legitimate reason for maintaining IP protections on covid-19 vaccines in the midst of an unprecedented global health crisis.
One would think that if the ruling class was so hell-bent on reopening the country, they’d do whatever they could to vaccinate as many people in the world as possible to ensure that this pandemic doesn’t turn endemic. However, those in power have decided that it’s more important for a few people to make huge profits than to ensure that covid-19 vaccinations are made widely available to the global south as the pandemic continues to rage there. The commitment to protecting IP protections that reap billions in profits for the pharmaceutical industry and those invested in it while denying vaccines to the global south is nothing if not genocidal.
Matt Dougherty is an independent journalist and managing editor at The Bull-Moose Note. You can subscribe here to get our articles delivered directly to your inbox. If you’d like to support our work, which is always made available for free, you can give a one-time donation through Venmo or become a monthly supporter for $3, $6, or $12 per month through Patreon.