This month, the world may be celebrating the waning of the Covid-19 pandemic. Instead, vaccine apartheid and restricted production continue to fuel its spread.
A year has passed since the first Covid-19 vaccines were approved, offering hope that humanity could be liberated from this disease.
Scientists created safe and effective vaccines with unprecedented speed. But world leaders failed to deliver them to all.
Public health experts, developing-country governments and the People’s Vaccine Alliance warned that persistent low vaccination coverage in large parts of the world would create a risk of new variants and prolong the pandemic.
We argued that ending the pandemic required enabling developing countries to make their own vaccines. We urged rich countries to share the rights to vaccine technology and Covid-19 treatments, removing barriers at the World Trade Organization (WTO).
Former world leaders, Nobel laureates, nurses, jurists and millions of individuals have echoed this call.
But rich countries turned a deaf ear, bowing to the pressure of pharmaceutical corporations. Despite receiving huge amounts of public funding to produce the vaccines, they dictate the terms of supply, distribution and pricing. Pfizer, Moderna and BioNTech alone make a $1,000 (Sh100,000) profit per second from Covid-19 vaccines.
Putting profits first has resulted in less than four per cent of people in low-income countries being fully vaccinated, creating an optimal breeding ground for new variants. Meanwhile, at least five million or more people have died of the coronavirus.
Africa remains unprotected and is bracing for more variants. Like many other Africans, I have lost friends and family to this disease. Exhausted relatives in my home country, Uganda, no longer announce deaths, let alone report cases. In Africa, six of seven Covid-19 cases go undetected.
It feels like déjà vu. Between 1997 and 2006, some 12 million Africans died from HIV/Aids because pharmaceutical monopolies priced poor countries out of lifesaving antiretroviral (ARV) drugs. Getting access took a spirited movement that began with people living with HIV and expanded to include everyone from doctors and the clergy to Nelson Mandela. Eventually, governments and producers of generic drugs in India, Thailand, Brazil and elsewhere worked together to break the monopoly and the prices dropped by 99 per cent.
Imagine if the world had learnt the lessons of that historical injustice. Imagine if, a year ago, world leaders had agreed to compensate the vaccine developers generously but not give them exclusive rights. Imagine if they had insisted that, to qualify for public funding, vaccine producers would have to share any successful formula openly.
Imagine if they had agreed to pay qualified producers everywhere to produce the vaccines. And imagine governments had started building enough additional manufacturing capacity rather than rely on a handful of corporate monopolies to repurpose a few factories.
It is a moral disaster that a few people are making billions of dollars by sitting on vaccine technology as billions others are unprotected and millions more suffer avoidable deaths.
We must imagine a different way, one that would vaccinate the world, address known and future variants and foster an equitable global post-pandemic economic recovery. Just as President Franklin D. Roosevelt broke up industrial monopolies to fight tyranny in WW2, the US can help the world overcome pharmaceutical monopolies to fight Covid-19.
Wealthy countries must scale up donations of excess doses and end vaccine hoarding. Despite repeated proclamations, as of October, they had delivered an inadequate 14 per cent of 1.8 billion promised vaccine doses.
They can also facilitate vaccine purchases. Yet even when African countries buy their own supplies — as Botswana did, purchasing a half-million doses from Moderna at $29 each, more than wealthy countries pay — companies often fail to meet their delivery commitments.
The US funded and co-developed the vaccine sold by Moderna through an agreement with the National Institutes of Health. If the manufacturing know-how was shared with the WHO through its South Africa Covid-19 mRNA hub, qualified manufacturers worldwide could begin to produce it. Experts have identified more than 100 qualified companies in Africa, Asia and Latin America with the capacity to make Covid-19 mRNA vaccines.
The proposed temporary intellectual-property waiver on Covid-19 vaccines and technologies at the WTO is a necessary precondition to defeat the pandemic. US President Joe Biden was right that the emergence of the Omicron variant “reiterates the importance” of approving the waiver. The US can use its diplomatic and economic influence to push other wealthy powers to end their opposition and embrace a resolution to benefit the world.
We do not have another year to lose. BY DAILY NATION