EU supports Covid-19 vaccine patent waiver talks, but critics say this won’t solve scarcity

The European Union (EU) on Thursday backed a US proposal to discuss waiving patent protections for Covid-19 vaccines, but drug makers and some other governments opposed the idea, saying it would not solve global inoculation shortages.

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen expressed willingness to explore a waiver after US President Joe Biden on Wednesday promoted the plan, reversing the US position.

“The main thing is  we have to speed this up,” US secretary of state Anthony Blinken said on Thursday as India battled a devastating Covid-19 outbreak.

“None of us are going to be fully safe until we get as many people vaccinated as possible.”

A patent waiver is “one possible means of increasing manufacture and access to vaccines,” he said as the White House denied a split among officials over the waiver idea.

Biden’s administration endorsed negotiations at the World Trade Organization (WTO) to gain global agreement.

WTO director-general Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala told member states she “warmly welcomed” the US move.

“We need to respond urgently to Covid-19 because the world is watching and people are dying,” she said.

World Health Organisation (WHO) chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus reached for capital letters in a tweet calling Biden’s move a “MONUMENTAL MOMENT IN THE FIGHT AGAINST #COVID19” and said it reflected “the wisdom and moral leadership of the US”.

Despite that enthusiasm, drug makers who stand to lose revenue if they are stripped of patent rights to Covid-19 vaccines and other critics found flaws in the proposal.

The complexities of manufacturing means free access to the intellectual property is not enough to immediately increase vaccine production, they said. Moderna waived its patent rights in October, and on Thursday noted the lack of companies able to rapidly manufacture a similar vaccine and secure approval for it.

Combined, Pfizer Inc and Moderna Inc have forecast more than $45bn (about R640bn) in sales this year for their Covid-19 vaccines.

In the long term, a waiver would discourage pharmaceutical companies from rapidly responding to future global health threats with large research investments, some said.

Germany, the EU’s biggest economic power and home to a large pharmaceutical sector, rejected the idea, saying vaccine shortages were due to limited production capacity and quality standards rather than patent protection issues.

Health minister Jens Spahn said he shared Biden’s goal of providing the whole world with vaccines. However, a government spokesperson said “the protection of intellectual property is a source of innovation and must remain so in the future”.

Moreover, a waiver would take months to negotiate and require unanimous agreement among the 164 countries in the WTO. Drug companies urged rich countries instead to share vaccines more generously with the developing world.

DOES NOT ADDRESS ‘REAL CHALLENGES’

Stock prices for drug makers largely recovered after initially falling sharply after Biden backed the waiver idea. Moderna was off 1.3% after earlier dropping 12%, and the US shares of its German partner BioNTech SE shed 0.6% after falling as much as 15% earlier.

“The bottleneck is neither access nor patents (or price) but simply that there aren’t enough vials, raw materials and so on to manufacture it regardless of patents,” Jefferies analyst Michael Yee said of expanding Covid-19 vaccine production.

The pharmaceutical industry’s main lobbying group, PhRMA, said: “This decision does nothing to address the real challenges to getting more shots in arms, including last-mile distribution and limited availability of raw materials.”

There have been more than 155 million confirmed coronavirus infections worldwide and almost 3.4 million peopled have died of illnesses related to Covid-19, according to a Reuters tally.

The vast bulk of the 624 million people who have received at least one dose of the vaccine, according to the Our World in Data website, live in wealthier countries.

The global Covax vaccine distribution program, led by the WHO and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (Gavi), that aims to supply vaccines to low-income countries, has so far handed out around 41 million doses.

French President Emmanuel Macron said he was “very much in favour” of opening up intellectual property. However, a French government official said vaccine shortages was the result of a lack of production capacity and ingredients, not of patents.

“I would remind you that it is the US that has not exported a single dose to other countries and is now talking about lifting the patents,” the official said.

The US has shipped a few million vaccine doses it was not using to Mexico and Canada on loan.

SA and India made the initial waiver proposal at the WTO in October, gathering support from many developing countries, to make vaccines more widely available.

Until now, the EU has been aligned with a group of countries, including the UK and Switzerland — home to large pharmaceutical companies — that have opposed the waiver.