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Seven billion doses of vaccines against the new coronavirus have already been purchased or ordered, says Krishna Udayakumar, deputy director of the Innovation Center for Global Health at Duke University in North Carolina (USA). There may be one for every inhabitant of the planet. But the distribution will be more like the old statistical anecdote of the chicken division: if I eat two and you don’t, we both eat chicken.
“It is a goal and an aspiration to be able to vaccinate 60% of the African continent,” said John Nkengasong, the Cameroonian virologist who heads the Center for Disease Control and Prevention – Africa, an entity of the Union African established as the North American CDC. Nkengasong acknowledged that it is impossible for vaccination against the new coronavirus to begin on the African continent before mid-2021, at best. And he estimated that 1,500 million doses of vaccines would be needed, little more than the doses the European Union has already purchased for its population.
However, the EU has 741.4 million inhabitants and the African continent, according to United Nations estimates, has 1353 million inhabitants, almost double.
This is the picture of what is happening in the world: the richest countries, usually above the equator, have rushed to make deals with pharmaceutical companies to finance the rapid development of vaccines for covid-19, buying millions in advance. doses for its population. “3700 million doses have already been purchased from high-income countries, through bilateral agreements, 1700 million doses from low-middle-income countries and 700 million more from high-income countries,” lists Udayakumar, whose team collected data. to build a database.
“It is quite clear that richer countries have chosen to think for themselves and have launched a race to purchase as many different vaccine doses as possible in advance. This means they will have the vaccine before anyone else, “Els Torreele, of the Institute for Innovation and Public Purposes at University College London, trained in bioengineering and biomedicine but doing human rights research, told PUBLIC. innovation and access to medicines. He published an analysis in the journal in early November Development on how the vaccine “rush” is exposing the shortcomings of the medical innovation system.
Instead of increasing collective intelligence, he argues, this system of business as usual it is based on competition between patent-protected vaccines, which makes it possible to lower the level of demands for safety and efficacy of products, endangering people’s health and reducing trust.
Despite the fine words, the warnings against “vaccine nationalism”, that was the way forward – with the President of the United States, Donald Trump, opening new horizons, when he decided to also leave the World Health Organization and disconnect from everything and all.
“Of course, rich countries want to protect themselves, but they are subverting global solidarity,” said Hu Yuan Qiong, legal counsel for Doctors Without Borders (MSF), on the issues of access to drugs and intellectual property. “A lot of money has been invested in accelerating vaccine research, but there have been a lot of government grants, including from patients, that don’t get counted,” he said.
“Vaccines are based on a technology platform that would not have existed without the rapid genome sequencing of the novel coronavirus, for example. And many come from research to develop a vaccine against the Ebola virus, ”he exemplified.
Suspend patents
MSF is one of the many organizations that support a proposal submitted by India and South Africa to the World Trade Organization (WTO) for the temporary suspension of certain intellectual property rights, namely the TRIPS agreement, which opens the doors to the poorest countries import or manufacture generic drugs.
India and South Africa have a pharmaceutical industry with a large capacity to produce vaccines or other medicines, already tested by the HIV / AIDS crisis. His proposal received WTO support from Mozambique and Pakistan. It was discussed at the WTO in October and half a week ago, in an informal meeting behind closed doors, and what is known is that it has sparked strong opposition from rich countries.
“We realized that the European Union, the United States, Canada, Japan, do not agree with this path. But these are the nations that account for more than half of future covid19 vaccines, ”Hu said. “We think it’s a strange and very questionable position, because on the one hand they take an approach to defend their interests. They are undermining global solidarity, because there simply aren’t enough vaccines for everyone, “he said.
“India and South Africa in particular can be very important in enabling global access to vaccines. The Serum Institute, India [o maior fabricante mundial de vacinas, por volume]for example, it has become a large vaccine factory for the world and has already invested significantly in increasing its production capacity of the covid-19 vaccine, ”Krishna Udayakumar told PUBLIC. In South Africa, several vaccine clinical trials are ongoing, which have their counterparts locally. “This type of capability allows the population to have access to high quality production technologies at affordable prices. That’s what we hope to see around the world, “Udayakumar concluded.
But will the challenge launched by India and South Africa to the WTO have a chance of success? There is a new formal meeting of the TRIPS council on December 10 and the WTO general council on December 17, Hu says. An editorial by Wall Street newspaper classified this attempt as “an assault,” which demonstrates the tone of the official narrative. Els Torreele, who has also been a consultant to MSF, does not believe much that it is possible to double the powerful pharmaceutical companies, which have the richest countries on their side, but thinks it is necessary to try.
“It is a very important political process. Intellectual property should, neither now nor ever, be an obstacle to public health, ”Torreele said. “But is it realistic? Probably not. Because the power dynamic is not in your favor. But it is very important to put pressure on them to understand that it makes no sense to continue defending unsustainable positions: private interests versus public health ”.
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