The People’s Vaccine Alliance has called for the immediate approval of the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) waiver to ensure greater access to Covid-19 vaccine tests and treatments in low income countries (LICs).
The People’s Vaccine Alliance, in a statement, noted that sub-Saharan Africa has only received enough doses to fully vaccinate 12 percent of its population.
According to the vaccine alliance group, lack of access to vaccines globally is a factor that created the perfect breeding ground for Omicron and other new Covid-19 variants.
South Africa’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) announced on 25 November it had detected a new Covid-19 variant said to be more infectious. It was officially labelled as B.1.1.529 and the WHO christened it the ‘Omicron’ variant.
‘A year since a UK grandmother became the first person in the world to receive the Pfizer/BioNTech [Covid-19] vaccine, great strides have been made to fully vaccinate over three billion people, but many poorer parts of the world have been left behind’, People’s Vaccine Alliance said in a statement.
‘While countries like the UK and Canada have had enough doses to fully vaccinate their entire populations, sub-Saharan Africa has only received enough doses to vaccinate one in eight people’.
The group also said that the number of people in the UK that have received their third booster jab was almost the same as the total number of people fully vaccinated across all LICs.
Development Diaries understands that out of 5.7 billion doses of Covid-19 vaccines administered around the world so far, only two percent have been in Africa.
42 countries in Africa missed the global goal of vaccinating the most vulnerable ten percent of every country’s population against Covid-19 by the end of September, data from the World Health Organisation (WHO) shows.
‘Omicron is with us because we have failed to vaccinate the world. This should be a wake-up call’, Executive Director of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV and AIDS (UNAIDS) and Co-Chair of the People’s Vaccine Alliance, Winnie Byanyima said.
‘Business as usual has led to huge profits for pharmaceutical firms, but many people left unvaccinated meaning that this virus continues to mutate. It is the definition of madness to keep doing the same thing and expect a different outcome’.
The African Union (AU) had accused vaccine manufacturers of denying African countries a fair chance to buy them, and urged manufacturing countries to lift export restrictions on vaccines and their components.
The People’s Vaccine Alliance also criticised the European Union’s (EU) opposition to TRIPS waiver and called France’s recent withdrawal of its earlier support for the TRIPS waiver ‘ludicrous and dangerous’ in the face of the new Omicron variant.
TRIPS is a multilateral agreement that establishes minimum standards for the regulation of different forms of intellectual property rights by member states of the World Trade Organisation (WTO).
In October 2020, India and South Africa introduced a document requesting a waiver from certain provisions of the TRIPS agreement for the prevention, containment and treatment of Covid-19.
The Executive Director of Oxfam, Gabriela Bucher, had also reechoed the call for action on the TRIPS waiver after South Africa’s President, Cyril Ramaphosa, had urged the WTO to pass the TRIPS waiver.
WHO and its partners have said that they hope to provide Africa with about 30 percent of the Covid-19 vaccines the continent needs by February 2022. The approval of the TRIPS waiver will greatly facilitate the achievement of WHO’s new goal.
‘With the new threat of the Omicron variant, it is clear that we cannot just booster our way out of the pandemic while leaving much of the developing world behind. Unless all countries are vaccinated as soon as possible we could see wave after wave of variants’, Oxfam’s Health Policy Manager, Anna Marriott, said.
‘What is the point in developing new vaccines in 100 days if they are then only sold in limited amounts to the highest bidder, once again leaving poor nations at the back of the queue’.
The People’s Vaccine Alliance, which has over 80 members, called for all vaccines, including new versions designed to combat the Omicron variant, to be declared global public goods and vaccine recipes, and shared openly with producers worldwide via the WHO.
Source: The People’s Vaccine
Photo source: IOM/Amanda Nero
