By JOSEPH DANA
We are at a crossroads in the fight against the coronavirus disease (COVID-19). Despite the historic global vaccination effort that is underway, variants and mutations of the virus keep popping up. This has led to worries that the fight against the pandemic cannot move forward without an extra focus on less-developed countries.
In Africa, most nations have not yet secured enough vaccines to inoculate their populations, and often even to start. The burdensome regulations embedded in the intellectual property rights of vaccine manufacturers, which effectively act to keep vaccines from those in the developing world, must be addressed and possibly suspended to truly kick-start a global vaccination drive. Indeed, if ever there was a time to do something about the balance between economics and morality, it should be now, during possibly the worst outbreak of disease the world has known.
The US had an opportunity to pressure vaccine manufacturers to make them supply developing countries at lower costs. The government owns a crucial piece of intellectual property used in creating the so-called messenger RNA-type vaccines. But the Trump administration did not. The Biden White House has signaled it may do so, but will it and can it? It all depends on the details of the contracts the US negotiated with the drug companies.
What it can clearly do, however, is give more pharmaceutical companies the right to use that same technology to create the next generation of vaccines, which will surely be needed soon. People, even those already vaccinated, will require new-generation jabs, much like the flu shot must be refreshed every year.
It is no accident that COVID-19 vaccines have been mostly developed in the West, particularly the biotech-enabled versions. That is because they depend on a string of technologies jealously guarded by Western firms, or for which they demand high prices to license. But the human resource ability of non-Western firms to conceive of and create new drugs using these technologies is unquestioned. Scientific papers on the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 have been produced by 111 countries. Many of these papers are readily shared. However, “science” and “technology,” though related, are not synonymous. The latter is ring-fenced by legality. Today, these might be deadly legalities.
Since vaccines began emerging in trials, it has been a case of every nation for itself in the West. Richer countries have engaged in an unseemly display of vaccine nationalism. The US is on track to receive 400 million doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines by the end of May and then 600 million in total by the end of July, enough to vaccinate 300 million people. And yet, as the scholar and intellectual Zeynep Tufekci notes, as of the end of March, 130 countries were yet to administer a single dose of vaccine.
There is, thus, an imperative for non-Western drug manufacturers — beyond those in China and Russia — to develop, as well as to produce, more vaccines. But beyond the technologies behind vaccine development, there is also a string of intellectual property rights embedded in the manufacturing process. This also needs to be freed up so developing nations’ pharmaceutical companies can churn out more doses, instead of waiting for Western nations to decide when they can finally get access. Even the EU, the self-described champion of the developing world, is engaged in an implicit claim of entitlement with echoes of the unsavoriness of imperialism.
Drug companies have traditionally argued that they pursue expensive research into a range of drugs. Most fail, and so those that succeed must essentially pay for the cost of the rest. The argument in this business model cannot be faulted. Certainly, that is the case with, say, microchips. But it has never made any moral sense in the case of drugs. A cellphone is not an existential necessity. –AN
