Covid and vaccines: pharmaceutical monopolies against …

When in 1998 Africa greatly exceeded the number of HIV-positive people compared to the rest of the world, several countries on the continent asked to withdraw the patents of the drugs. to avoid deaths. The rich countries where most of the pharmaceutical companies are located have refused and expensive drugs available since 1996, it took ten years to arrive to low-income countries at an affordable price.

When India and South Africa proposed to suspend IP compliance as the Covid-19 vaccine race entered phase 2, the world was piling up around a million dead. Today, market logic prevailed again: the debate is still open and so are the dead. The world is already almost piling up three million.

In the pharmaceutical industry, when a laboratory develops a drug, some companies file a patent on its discovery to protect the intellectual property of the product and prevent others from copying. To patent a drug is to acquire exclusivity to produce and market it for twenty years.

The production model in the pharmaceutical industry operates on the basis of a scheme in which the most risky investment (due to its ability to fail), that of Research and Development (R&D), is financed by funds public or private; then it is patented allowing the holder act like a monopolist and set high prices with its resulting extraordinary profitability. The consequence: extraordinary profits are generated.

For example, the shares of the Boston-based Modern laboratory in the United States, which produces one of the vaccines against covid-19, increased by 160% between October 2020 and April 2021. Some market estimates assure that it can generate over $ 5,000 million a year.

Inequalities and mutations

The World Health Organization, which relies on the administration of vaccines around the world, has ensured that the 75 percent of vaccinations against covid-19 occurred in 10 rich countries. How to counter some 130 countries, home to more than 2.5 billion people, has not received not a single vaccine and it is estimated that many of them will have to wait until 2024.

One of the most direct and at the same time counterproductive impacts, even for countries that support this model, are the mutations that occur due to the reproduction of the virus itself. Variants will continue to be developed and some vaccines will not be effective, generating new forms of this pandemic.

“The intention of the patents was to promote innovation, but in the case of medical technologies, time has shown the opposite,” he told Page 12 Lorena Di Giano, executive director of Grupo Efecto Positivo (GEP) and lawyer specializing in intellectual property rights, questions pharmaceutical companies: “They have become companies that speculate on the stock markets. The combination of multiple patent actions brings us prices that neither users nor states can pay. They have an obligation to guarantee public health ”.

Health or commerce

The hashtag #liberenlasvacunas has reached the media in recent days, but since phase 2, some countries and specialist organizations are claiming the patent liberalization, copyright, industrial designs and information protection for the treatment, prevention and containment of covid-19. This is what India and South Africa’s proposal is about to the Council for Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (Adpic) of the World Trade Organization.

Adpic is an agreement that was signed between 1986 and 1994 and forced all WTO member countries to grant patents on drugs. Argentina was one of them: it joined in 1995 and started applying in 2000.

“Many countries which excluded – for public health reasons – the patenting of pharmaceutical products, had to adapt their legislation to this new international regulation. Failure to do so would expose itself to legitimate commercial retaliation through the settlement mechanism. WTO disputes “, explains the survey. “Access to Medicines” produced by Carlos Correa and Germán Velásquez from the Centro del Sur organization.

Although it enjoys the support of around 100 low- and middle-income countries and more than 400 civil society organizations, the proposal from India and South Africa (which has already been debated three times since the start of the pandemic at the WTO) is not prospering. .

The necessary consensus (the support of three quarters of the countries that make up the body) has not yet been obtained for it to be dealt with in the next forum, which is the General Council of the WTO. Of the 123 supports needed, they already have more than 100.

To sum up the geopolitical map, some of the pro-liberalization countries are Argentina, Bangladesh, Chad (representing members of low income countries), Egypt, Honduras, Indonesia, Mozambique, Pakistan , Sri Lanka, Tunisia and Venezuela. On the contrary, the richest countries where the main pharmaceutical companies are located are opposed: Australia, the United States, England, Brazil, Japan, Norway, Switzerland and the European Union. Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Philippines, Jamaica, Nigeria, Senegal, Thailand and Turkey will analyze the proposal.

What the laboratories say

The big pharmaceutical companies use at least two arguments by which they justify their rejection of the demand for equitable access to vaccines: that the problem is not intellectual property but the production capacity; and that without intellectual property rights they will not have the incentives to continue to research, for example, the new strains that are presented.

“Intellectual property rights are not the problem,” said Thomas Cueni, director of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Associations and Producers (Ifpma) representing major vaccine producers at a conference hosted by the WHO, “The Bottlenecks of throttling are the capacity, the scarcity of raw materials, the scarcity of ingredients. And this has to do with knowledge. “

This statement has been denied by various countries: “In Latin America, Brazil and Argentina have the infrastructure to start producing now. Some countries do not have the technology to undertake new research, but they have the capacity. to manufacture the vaccines already approved. “, Assures Di Giano and adds that in any way this would generate an expansion of the supply, contributing to lower its price and to open the negotiation on behalf of the countries with less resources.

The document from the South Center mentioned above assures that “according to the pharmaceutical industry for the development of a new molecule for medical use, an investment of 2,500 million dollars was necessary. On the other hand, a study carried out by independent researchers , published by the London School of Economics estimated the average cost of developing a new drug to be just $ 43.4 million, “he explains and concludes:” as long as there is no transparency on what the real R&D costs, the problem of price and, consequently, of access to medicines, will remain unresolved. ”

Likewise, a report published in February in the medical journal The Lancet shows that vaccine producers received approximately $ 10 billion in public and nonprofit funding to finance their vaccines, even knowing that this figure may be underestimated.

A detailed study on the development of AstraZeneca vaccines agrees on the essence of this fact: the pharmaceutical industry supported less than 3% of research costs: most of the 120 million euros were invested by the Kingdom. United (45 million) and the European Commission (30 million) and other entities of public funds.

While the debate is still open, the countries of the center are wasting no time, the multinational pharmaceutical companies working on its development already have patent applications in different parts of the world. “We found 188 patents associated with vaccines with a demonstrated immune response,” revealed Di Giano.

Faced with the number of accessions, the WTO proposed a “third position“which allows the granting of voluntary licenses. This will mean maintaining intellectual property rights by encouraging private agreements between laboratories and governments to allow technology transfers. “Voluntary licenses don’t work, they appeal to the will of each laboratory. What he does is enhance the real purpose of the debate, which is the suspension of patents, ”said Di Giano to himself.

Another proposal in this direction conceived by the WHO in June 2020, is the joint access to technology against covid-19, which also calls for the voluntarism of the sharing of data and the intellectual property of technologies. However, the program has had few adherents.

The third attempt and failure is Covax, which has a very minor impact: until the end of February, it only had access to 2% of everything Pfizer will produce and distribute in 145 countries.

It seems that the intermediate solutions are not viable. “Medicines are not commodities,” Colombian activist Luis Guillermo Restrepo explained: “one day we will remember patents as today we remember slavery“.