The World Health Organization’s statement that Omicron is a “variant of concern” is yet another strong reminder that the severely unequal access to COVID-19 vaccines poses a serious threat to the world’s population.
The pandemic has exposed the dangers of concentrating life-saving vaccine manufacturing capacity in a handful of countries where governments have refused to prioritize and mandate the sharing of intellectual property and technology for rapid diversified and global production. As scientists scramble to determine whether Omicron poses additional dangers over other variants, its specter reflects political failure as some wealthy country governments and pharmaceutical companies undermine quick and equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines, therapeutic drugs, and testing .
Wealthy countries are blocking intellectual property surrenders from the World Trade Organization and focusing vaccine production on the US and Europe. This has prolonged devastating cycles of COVID-19 spikes, deaths, travel restrictions and bans, allowing the virus to mutate and spread.
For over a year, the governments of South Africa and India have made efforts at the WTO to promote fairer access to COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics by referring to some provisions of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) waive. Approving a TRIPS waiver would temporarily suspend certain intellectual property and world trade rules for health products needed for the COVID-19 response.
However, some wealthy and powerful states like the European Union, the United Kingdom and Switzerland have repeatedly blocked a temporary exemption, preventing the widespread manufacture and distribution of Covid-19 vaccines to low and middle income countries. The result is that, according to the UN, almost 65% of people in high-income countries are vaccinated, but only 8% in poor countries. According to the World Health Organization, six times more boosters are given each day worldwide than the first dose in low-income countries.
The waiver would allow countries to work together to expand production of vaccines and other health products without fear of trade-based retaliation. Negotiations on the derogation were due to resume at the WTO Ministerial Conference in late November and early December, but the Agency postponed the conference due to concerns about the traveling representatives. World leaders should continue to work towards a swift adoption of the waiver proposal.
With rich nations lacking shared access to vaccines, COVID-19 continues to cause serious illness and death that vaccines could have prevented. As documented by Human Rights Watch and others, the social and economic consequences of the pandemic have been widespread and devastating, particularly for health workers, marginalized groups, and people living in poverty.
US companies Moderna, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson quickly developed life-saving vaccines with significant support from the US government; Approximately $ 1 billion in public funding to Moderna and J&J for COVID-19 vaccine research and development. The US National Institutes of Health funded fundamental innovations that made Moderna and BioNTech-Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccines possible. But these companies have not shared their technology with the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 Technology Access Pool or the World Health Organization’s mRNA Technology Transfer Hub, which limits the ability of companies in other parts of the world to manufacture more vaccines for the global response.
The inequalities in vaccine availability and access reflect the failure to ensure that international human rights standards guide the global strategy for an equitable exit from this global public health emergency. Governments have a shared responsibility to take steps to prevent public health threats and ensure access to health care for those who need it, and to work together to share the benefits of science.
All governments should work to temporarily waive intellectual property rights. Until vaccines and therapeutics are fairly distributed, an end to the COVID-19 pandemic is nowhere in sight, a coalition of nursing unions said last week.
It is unreasonable for wealthy nations to reduce life-saving health care to a tradable good and use their power at the WTO to subordinate human health to the pharmaceutical industry and commercial interests. A powerful minority of governments have cynically prioritized the economic interests of their own and domestic businesses as infections and deaths skyrocket worldwide.
And as the number of cases rises everywhere – again – this is a reminder that a country’s people or economy cannot be fully protected from a deadly infectious disease until everyone is protected.
Adi Radhakrishnan is a research fellow and Kyle Knight is a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch. You wrote this column for the Dallas Morning News.
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