The delta variant emerged in India, omicron in South Africa, two countries with a high incidence of coronavirus and a low vaccination rate. It’s not by chance. A year ago, these two countries proposed to the World Trade Organization (WTO) a temporary exemption from patents to ensure that vaccines reached the world quickly and fairly. It was the way to stop the spread of the virus and prevent new and dangerous variants from emerging. We have wasted precious time. Now, the appearance of the new and disturbing omicron has forced to suspend the 12 Ministerial Assembly of the WTO that was to be held in Geneva from November 30 with the patent exemption proposal on the agenda. The suspension of flights prevents a new discussion on how to prevent this from happening.
Two-thirds of the 164 WTO countries support suspending the protection of the intellectual property of vaccines and the procedures for manufacturing them for three years. The initiative found in the new president of the United States, Joe Biden, a powerful and unexpected ally, but the fierce opposition of the European Union, led by Germany, and other countries with strong interests in the commercialization of vaccines has left it in the limbo of paralyzing discussions. The EU maintains that the existing provisions on voluntary licenses are sufficient to ensure the delivery of vaccines. But if something has been seen in this lost year, it is that these mechanisms are a complete failure, including the cumbersome figure full of obstacles of compulsory licenses for public health reasons, possible since 2001.
A year later, 80% of the vaccines manufactured, according to the WHO, have been injected in rich countries, which barely add up to 15% of the world’s population. And the Covax vaccine donation program has barely managed to distribute 400 million of the 2,000 that it had to distribute before the end of 2021.
What makes this new strain disturbing is that it gathers many more mutations than expected and in a few days it has displaced the delta variant, which was already more contagious than the previous ones. It is believed that it mutated in the body of an immunosuppressed person due to HIV, which connects it with another previous inequality: that of access to AIDS treatments. With 8.2 million infected, South Africa is the country with the greatest impact of HIV. Is omicron the supervariant feared by some reputable virologists? It is still too early to tell, but as the rich world closes borders and rushes to deliver a third booster dose, the havoc it may cause will again be concentrated in poor countries with the lowest vaccination rates. And if it were confirmed that the new variant is capable of eluding the protection of vaccines, even if pharmaceutical companies could develop an effective adaptation against the new variant, we would only return to the starting box.
What is the outlook, a wall for the vaccinated world? At what costs? The intermittent paralysis of world trade? For how long? In the discussion on patents, the benefits of a few companies must be balanced, and in the other, the cost in lives and economic losses of the decision not to share knowledge to produce vaccines on a large scale. Surely if you do the numbers, the patent exemption pays off, even if the pharmaceutical companies had to be generously compensated for lost profits. Even if we forget that to obtain those patents, the top six vaccine manufacturers received $ 12 billion in public funding. Hopefully omicron is not as dangerous as it can be. Hopefully it will disappear as the beta variant disappeared. But if not, we will regret not having done what everyone knows to do: share the technology and start producing vaccines around the world.
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