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Tackling COVID-19 amid vaccine scarcity The Punch
Published 3 June 2021
SIX months after the commencement of the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines, Africa has been left behind in the race for doses due to poverty and poor planning caused by decades of bad leadership. The continent, which has largely depended on foreign aid from western countries for decades and imports 95 per cent of its drugs, has been left high and dry as developed nations scamper to meet the domestic vaccine needs of their citizens before shipping doses to Africa and other developing regions.
With many African countries exhausting their doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, which they received for free through the COVAX facility, they are now unable to administer a second jab due to the ban on exportation of vaccines by India, which is grappling with a COVID-19 crisis on an unimaginable scale. This has undermined the progress in the fight against the pandemic. Experts describe the situation as a
consensus among member states. The European Commission
said it would begin discussions on waivers but Germany, home to BioNTech, the firm that created the vaccine being marketed by Pfizer, said it
opposed a waiver because “the protection of the intellectual property is a source of innovation and must remain so”.
However, the Indian government has taken a different line domestically: At a hearing in India’s Supreme Court this month, the court asked the government whether it intended to issue any compulsory licenses to companies to manufacture drugs like remdesivir that are being used for Covid-19 treatment.
The government reportedly
Use sovereign rights to grant compulsory license for vaccine, medicines: SJM to govt
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“We understand that the government needs to use the public health safeguards in the Patents Act and permit more companies to produce these medicines in the coming days,” Mahajan said in the statement, explaining that India would require around 2 billion doses of vaccine in the next 6 months and there is a need to multiply these efforts.
AFP
The SJM has launched a “Digital Signature Campaign for Universal Access of Vaccine and Medicines”.
Swadeshi Jagran Manch, an affiliate of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh on Monday suggested the government to use its sovereign rights to grant the compulsory license to other pharma manufacturers to produce vaccine and medicines to fight the Covid-19 pandemic. Pushing for the involvement of more companies in manufacturing vaccines and medicines like Remdesivir, it termed patent protection as a “major barrier” to the generic