Several humanitarian organisations have reiterated their call on the European Union (EU) to approve the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) waiver to ensure greater access to vaccines in low income countries (LICs).
This latest call followed a new analysis from the People’s Vaccine Alliance, which revealed that the EU will have to throw away 55 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines by the end of February.
Campaigners have noted that the amount of vaccines the EU is set to discard is much more than the 30 million doses they have donated to Africa so far in 2022, with just 11 percent of people on the continent fully vaccinated.
The vaccine alliance group said in a statement that Europe had ‘betrayed Africa’ by blocking the TRIPS waiver and hoarding millions of doses which are set to expire at the end of the month.
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.
If countries agree on the waiver, countries can choose not to grant or enforce IP (patents, industrial designs, copyright, and trade secrets) related to all Covid-19 medical products and technologies.
‘EU member states, led by Germany, have been a major blocker of proposals tabled by South Africa and India and supported by the African Union and over 100 countries for an intellectual property waiver that would allow the generic production of [Covid-19] vaccines, tests and treatments’, the statement read.
‘The People’s Vaccine Alliance, a group of nearly 100 organisations including African Alliance, Christian Aid, Oxfam, Public Services International and UNAIDS, says the EU should be held to account for the lack of vaccines in Africa, because it has stood so firmly in the way of the continent being able to produce its own doses’.
Oxfam International also called on pharmaceutical giants and international partners to garner support for the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) mRNA Hub in Africa.
‘It is unacceptable that BioNTech, along with other pharma giants, is ignoring the World Health Organisation’s mRNA Hub in Africa, which is ready to produce vaccines and expand manufacturing in favour of a BioNTech-controlled vaccine container module that [will not] be producing vaccines for well over a year’, Oxfam’s Health Policy Manager, Anna Marriott, said.
‘To date, Germany has exported just one percent of its vaccines to the African continent. If Germany is serious about tackling vaccine inequality it must reverse its refusal to support the waiving of intellectual property rules for these life-saving pandemic tools and insist BioNTech transfer their technology now to the World Health Organisation so that existing manufacturers across Africa, Latin America and Asia can make them’.
Also, the Global Justice Now’s Tim Bierley said, ‘After a year of stalling efforts to scale up global vaccine production, BioNTech’s pop-up vaccine factories are little more than a neo-colonial stunt to try and maintain control of this life-saving technology in Africa.
‘This is inexcusable when we know there are several factories in Africa with the capacity to create these kinds of vaccines today, if BioNTech and others were willing to share the tech in this global emergency’.
The African Union (AU) had accused vaccine manufacturers of denying African countries a fair chance to buy Covid-19 vaccines and urged manufacturing countries to lift export restrictions on vaccines and their components.
Development Diaries gathered that the AU leaders have asked for a reference to the TRIPS waiver to be included in the February AU-EU Summit outcome.
Photo source: AMISOM
