South Africa, a pioneer in vaccine patent suspension – Opinion

European Union parliamentarians, more than 175 Nobel Prize winners and former leaders and 34 international organizations are calling for the temporary suspension of patents on Covid-19 vaccines.

Tomorrow there will be a key meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Switzerland to address this controversial issue, under the general illusion that access to vaccinations will be facilitated worldwide, especially for residents of poor countries.

The claim began last October from India and South Africa, which already have a record in their favor in terms of patent release.

It was 1998 and 250,000 South Africans died of AIDS every year as pharmaceutical companies claimed they could not lower the prices of drugs to treat the disease. The annual salary at that time cost 15 thousand dollars.

That year, the South African Parliament enacted the suspension of pharmaceutical patents so that Nelson Mandela’s government could import generic drugs. Immediately, 38 drug companies filed a lawsuit to revoke these regulations.

This confrontation led to the condemnation of the main developed countries, grouped behind the American government of Bill Clinton, for which the pharmaceutical companies withdrew the lawsuit in 2001.

Twenty-three years after this incident, 20 million Africans are receiving HIV treatment for less than $ 100 a year.

Mandela’s South Africa has succeeded in twisting the arm of the powerful pharmaceutical industry.

Today, in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, the world faces a similar dilemma: accepting that pharmaceutical companies do their business – a valid reason for their existence – or pressuring them so that the global collective inoculation is not not a utopia.

This is the proposal of Doctors Without Borders, which launched a campaign by a meeting of signatures for governments to demand exemption from patents for diagnostics, treatments and vaccines to treat Covid-19 during the term of the pandemic.

The organization maintains that “life is more important than the profits of the company”.

In this context, the director of the WTO, the Nigerian Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, has so far been in favor of a third way which would imply the maintenance of intellectual rights, but promoting agreements between laboratories to broaden the production chain, and between these companies. and countries to continue technology transfer.