MICHELLE GOLDBERG: Biden, the world needs your help to end the pandemic
Saturday, April 24, 2021 -- Widespread vaccination is freeing many Americans from a year of terror and isolation, even as new waves of the pandemic ravage countries like India and Brazil. Low- and middle-income countries say that a temporary change to global trade rules will help them defend themselves. Does the Biden administration really want to stand against them?
Posted — Updated“The World Health Organization is leading an unprecedented global effort to promote international cooperation in the search for COVID-19 treatments and vaccines,” Barkan said. “But Donald Trump has refused to join that effort, cutting America off from the rest of the world. If the U.S. discovers a vaccine first, will you commit to sharing that technology with other countries, and will you ensure there are no patents to stand in the way of other countries and companies mass-producing those lifesaving vaccines?”
Biden was unequivocal. “It lacks any human dignity, what we’re doing,” he said of Trump’s vaccine isolationism. “So the answer is yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And it’s not only a good thing to do, it’s overwhelmingly in our interest to do.”
Most major health and human rights NGOs have joined the campaign for a waiver, including Doctors Without Borders, Partners in Health, Human Rights Watch and Oxfam International.
“This is, I think, one of the first promises broken,” Asia Russell, the executive director of the Health Global Access Project, an international advocacy organization, said of the Biden administration’s failure to support a waiver, at least so far. She compares it to the administration’s brief refusal to lift Trump’s refugee caps. “That was pretty completely reversed,” she said. “And this one has not been. And we’re in a pandemic. If not now, when?”
To be fair, this issue is more complicated than that of refugee admissions. It’s easy enough to dismiss arguments from Big Pharma that lifting intellectual property protections will stifle innovation, given the enormous public subsidies that underlie the creation of the vaccines. “U.S. taxpayers have invested huge amounts into making this happen,” Schakowsky said. But other arguments deserve to be taken seriously.
Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine and a vaccine expert, isn’t against lifting the waiver, but thinks intellectual property isn’t the most important barrier to expanding vaccine access.
“It is an issue, but I wouldn’t put it at the top of the list,” he said. “Even if you were to liberalize all the patent restrictions completely tomorrow, it wouldn’t make a difference for this pandemic, I don’t think. And the reason is because the biggest problem is the technical know-how.” He argues that giving countries the formula for the vaccines won’t be enough if there isn’t a workforce trained to make them.
Hotez is working with a company in India to produce 1 billion doses of a “people’s vaccine,” a low-cost, easy-to-manufacture COVID inoculation that’s finishing up Phase 2 trials. He’d like the U.S. government to help him produce 5 billion doses.
“These new technology vaccines are exciting and they’re very innovative, but with a brand-new technology, it’s difficult to go from zero to 5 billion very quickly,” he said.
But while a WTO waiver isn’t sufficient to solve the vaccine shortage, it would be a start. In a recent letter to activist groups, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the director general of the WTO, acknowledged that there is “untapped production potential in the developing world. Getting the intellectual property and technology transfer dimension right is clearly critical to unlocking this potential.”
Many of the world’s most accomplished public health figures believe that a waiver is a first step in allowing this process to begin.
“Every day we don’t put progressive policies in place is a day lost to saving more lives, so more people die,” Russell said. “Because you can’t flip that switch overnight — you need six months, one year, beyond, to gear this up. It doesn’t take forever, by any stretch. But the longer we say it will take too long, it will take much too long.”
Right now, widespread vaccination is freeing many Americans from a year of terror and isolation, even as new waves of the pandemic ravage countries like India and Brazil. Low- and middle-income countries say that a temporary change to global trade rules will help them defend themselves. Does the Biden administration really want to stand against them?
“This is the only humane thing in the world to do,” he said. So he should do it.
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