Marvin Charles President Cyril Ramaphosa. (Photo: GCIS)
Two decades ago, at the height of the HIV/Aids epidemic, the World Trade Organisation was locked in a fierce battle between pharmaceutical companies who had developed HIV treatments.
President Cyril Ramaphosa says vaccines should be viewed as a global public good.
The US has announced its decision to support a temporary waiver on intellectual property rights for Covid-19 vaccines.
President Cyril Ramaphosa has weighed in on the vaccine-apartheid debate saying vaccines should be viewed as a global public good and should be made available to all, not just the highest bidder.
Ramaphosa said in his Monday newsletter: If we as the international community are truly committed to human rights and the values of equality and non-discrimination, vaccines should be viewed as a global public good.
Published May 10, 2021, 2:33 PM
The University of the Philippines Diliman’s (UP Diliman) task force monitoring the community’s coronavirus disease (COVID-19) situation expressed on Monday, May 10, its support to proposals to suspend patent rights and intellectual property rule to allow the Philippines and other developing countries to mass-produce vaccines.
(ALI VICOY / FILE PHOTO / MANILA BULLETIN)
In a statement, the UP Diliman COVID-19 Task Force and other members of the UP Diliman community particularly threw their support behind the proposals of India, South Africa, and other developing-country governments to temporarily waive the relevant provisions under the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement under the World Trade Organization.
President Cyril Ramaphosa says a proposal by South Africa at the World Trade Organisation to waiver specific Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) obligations related to the manufacturing of Covid-19 vaccines is now supported by over 100 countries.
The President said this when he responded to oral questions in the National Assembly on Thursday.
“We want to manufacture vaccines locally against the pandemic. It is for this reason that South Africa and India proposed the TRIPS waiver at the World Trade Organisation to enable the manufacturing of Covid-19 vaccines in developing countries. The proposal is now supported by more than 100 countries. SA welcomes the statement by the United States that it will support the TRIPS waiver on intellectual property protection for Covid-19 vaccines,” he said.
The Biden administration has now agreed to back a proposal to suspend intellectual property protection for COVID vaccines. This is a break from US government’s long-held position on strong intellectual property protection, which has also been supported by many research-intensive countries in western Europe as well and the pharmaceutical industry. These protections are codified in the World Trade Organization’s Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreements. India, South Africa, and many other emerging economies have been pushing for a waiver from patent protection, and have been supported in this effort by the director general of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. While the waiver cannot be put into place until other WHO members agree (at which point manufacturers can presumably start production without any licensing agreements), more and more countries that were previously opposed to the deal, including France and New Zealand, are also now indicat
The U.S. and Europe are debating waiving patent rights for COVID-19 vaccines, a move that could allow more companies to produce the vaccine around the world. But it’s not as simple as it might sound.
When the U.S. announced on May 5, 2021, that it supported the idea of a temporary waiver, the statement was vague. Some European countries still oppose even a narrow waiver.
Any agreement will take weeks of negotiation among the World Trade Organization’s 164 members, and then months more for production to begin.
That long timeline won’t solve the immediate problem. Many poor countries have vaccinated less than 1% of their populations, while 44% of the vaccine doses have gone to Europe and North America, where wealthy countries secured large vaccine contracts. At the same time, the disease is spreading quickly in South Asia, and new variants are raising the risks around the world.